Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent - something like an infant - deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer.
From Jack Henry Abbott
That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.
I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.
As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.
My eyes, my brain seek out escape routes wherever I am sent.
I escaped one time. In 1971 I was in the free world for six weeks.
I find it painful and angering to look in a mirror.
Paranoia is an illness I contracted in institutions. It is not the reason for my sentences to reform school and prison. It is the effect, not the cause.
One morning I woke up and was plunged into psychological shock. I had forgotten I was free.
Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life, every hour and minute of every day, and you can grasp the source of this paranoia, this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.
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