I am very cynical. That is absolutely what police is doing. But you don't even have to be cynical. I mean, politicians don't even pretend they're doing otherwise. The problem is the other side is not screaming bloody murder and saying, you know, "This is immoral, this is slavery, you're profiting from human bondage."

I'm not a fan of the death penalty. At some level I think killing is wrong, but I don't have sympathy for most of the people sentenced - I'm not a passionate anti-death penalty person. In truth, given all the other problems of the justice system, the numbers are so small, I think there are bigger fish to fry. Ironically, in terms of mental health and care, death row is probably the best prison situation to be in. There's a little more public eye on that, to ensure at least minimal levels of official treatment are actually given to death row prisoners.

If you're willing to give convicts time served and let them walk, why do you want to give them a criminal record? I mean, either they should be in jail, or be free. But it's all because of some internal bureaucratic stat about getting a felony conviction for the prosecutor. Everyone's got their own little game to play, but that prosecutorial part of it is not well known.

There's no straight line between closing the mental institutions and filling the prisons but there is some sort of relationship. And it's hard to tell how much mental illness among prisoners came in with them and how much is because of prison. I just imagine the real tragedy is there's probably a huge number of people who went in a little bit f - ked up and left completely insane because it's just a horrible treatment.

I don't think we can reduce the prison population now, so many of these people are damaged goods once they've spent much time in prison. It would have to be over a generation. But certainly, yeah, white collar crime.

I say a few good things about Canada in the book, you know. Americans are weird, though. We refuse to look at other countries. Start with Canadians - I want to think you aren't that different, so why can't we do our incarceration policies more like Canada? If we still had a 1970 level of incarceration which was the same as Canada's then and now, I never would have written this.

I'm not fond of ideologies. I don't like it when people have answers before they know the question.