There's a stone I had made for Luke at the top of the hill road, where the pasture opens wide and the setting sun highlights the words carved into its face. "That'll do, Luke, that'll do." The words are said to working dogs all over the world when the chores are done and the flock is settled: "That'll do dog, come home now, your work is done." Luke's work is done too. He took my heart and ran with it, and he's running still, fast and strong, a piece of my heart bound up with his, forever.

I couldn't stand living in a society that admires the emperor's new clothes, when I see so clearly that he is naked.

I can say now is that sneaking up on people is a major delight in my old age, but it always has been. A desire, even a need, to shock.

I had a naïve idea that if I could tell the story, people would be outraged and do something about conditions in the jails.

I was already a wreck when I went in, and prison nearly destroyed what little was left of me. I was worse when I came out than I was when I went in, and was not positively changed in any way.

I felt compelled to blow the whistle on the penal system, under the delusion that doing so might result in some change, or at least save a few women from the same fate. Eternally naïve, that's me.

My husband regarded my prison past as a dirty secret and never asked me one single question about it. But what I had experienced and witnessed was eating at me and I needed to "tell somebody."