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.

At age nine I began serving long stints in juvenile detention quarters. At age twelve I was sent to the Utah State Industrial School For Boys... at age eighteen I was released as an adult.

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.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

As long as I am nothing but a ghost of the civil dead, I can do nothing.

I am at this moment thirty-seven years old. Since aged twelve I have been free the sum total of nine and a half months.