I felt like there wasn't a political discourse. I felt like there was just one set of values, and any one set of values was wrong that there should at least be room for conversation.

I think in short order all of us need to act like we are citizens with not only rights, but also duties.

I would like to start a discussion about ending solitary confinement. I'd like to start a discussion about the removal of MO wings - an MO is a Mental Observation inmate - from Rikers Island, to be set up in mental health institutions. You can't put people in jail for having mental disorders.

I think the big turning moment was when I joined the student political action club and started studying nonviolent civil disobedience in response to the Iraq War. The first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta was the first protest that I'd ever been to, and I helped organize the school walkout when I was a junior. It was a really solidifying moment.

Jail is just another micro-society. It just happens that here, the problems are far more out in the open, we don't live with the facades of lies that democracy or capitalism creates for us.

I can be all pissed off at the oppression of the state, but what does that really mean? Well, it's the tacit consent of a public.

We're just trying to figure out what being a good citizen is, what participating in a democracy is, what taking responsibility for being an American citizen in a global context means to us.

You can't put people in jail for having mental disorders. You can't do that, and they should not be held there. They need rehabilitative therapy.