“Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?”

“Don't tell me what to do - you have eight numbers after your name just like me.”

“No matter how stupid, how pointless, how painful my current situation was, as I listened to Mixtape every week I couldn't deny the love I still felt for that reckless, audacious fool who was still me, if only in my mind.”

“In order for prisons to truly serve the public, the people who run them would do well to aspire to the words of Thomas Mott Osborne, the storied warden of New York's Sing Sing Prison in the early part of the twentieth century, who vowed, 'We will turn this prison from a scrap heap into a repair shop.”

“Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it's dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?”

“We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer.”

“When you are deep in misery, you reach out to those who can help, people who can understand.”

“Maybe, because all these good people loved me enough to help me, maybe I wasn't quite as bad as I felt. Maybe there was a part of me that was worthy of their love.”

“Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?”

“If I could forgive, it meant I was a strong good person who could take responsibility for the path I had chosen for myself, and all the consequences that accompanied that choice. And it gave me the simple but powerful satisfaction of extending a kindness to another person in a tough spot.”