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.
Jack Henry Abbott
Everyone in prison has an ideal of violence, murder. Beneath all relationships between prisoners is the ever-present fact of murder. It ultimately defines our relationship among ourselves.
prison violence
I cannot be critical of an infant whose only possible source of nourishment can be found in the dugs of a wolf.
prison
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.
anger life
That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.
prison life
When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.
life experience
I escaped one time. In 1971 I was in the free world for six weeks.
thetimes time
The part of me which wanders through my mind and never sees or feels actual objects, but which lives in and moves through my passions and my emotions, experiences this world as a horrible nightmare.
emotions mind experience
When I'm forced by circumstances to be in a crowd of prisoners, it's all I can do to refrain from attack.
circumstances
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.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill.
trials
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