For the first time I could remember, I felt weak, woozy and stupid— like a human-being. Like a very small and helpless human-being.

Those days [in prison] revealed the banal cruelties that jails create and nurture. I saw people punished not only by being locked up but then by being degraded, treated capriciously, their personal dignity undermined, with no real recourse of appeal for fairness and justice.

But, I was as helpless as a chess piece when I was lifted up by someone's hand And delivered from the corner my enemies had got me in But in all of my salvation I still felt imprisoned inside that holding cell that is myself

They must take me for a fool, or even worse, a lunatic. And no wonder ,for I am so intensely conscious of my misfortune and my misery is so overwhelming that I am powerless to resist it and am being turned into stone, devoid of all knowledge or feeling.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement... I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers... I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay

Methink I am thrice-imprisoned—ask not me
Of news that need no telling—
By loss of sight, confinement in my house,
And this vile body for my spirit’s dwelling.

They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.

The only reason they put me in jail is my involvement in politics, my criticism of the authorities. Later the excuse for my detention became my “tax problem.” But internally they never told me anything about it. I don’t want to underestimate their intelligence, but up to this day I think what they did is very stupid. In fact, they even helped me in an ironic sense. They gave me a chance to explain what is happening with this system. They provided such a platform for me.

I stood dumfounded, founded in dumbness.

I feel always that I am a prisoner.

And I realized — I realized how badly I'd been treated before, if my standards had become so low. If the freedom I'd been granted felt like a privilege and not an inherent right.

Already then, there was in my subconsciousness as unsatisfactoriness about powerlessness, which was accompanied by being locked in a cage, whereby made taking an initiative, of any kind, impossible

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.