Growing up in New Orleans, I was always the only black kid, or one of two, on the school soccer team. While I was always conscious of this status, what took precedent was my unfettered love of the game.

Supporting black professional athletes was taken seriously in my home.

Being incarcerated does not mean being devoid of the capacity to learn, grow, and think, and it's critical that prisons provide spaces where learning can be both cultivated and encouraged.

Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality.

Acquaintance with the human kingdom is limited: between death and a new birth - and this begins immediately or soon after death - the soul has contact and can make links only with those human souls, whether still living on earth or in yonder world, with whom he has already been karmically connected on earth in the last or in an earlier incarnation.

After Jessica Mitford published 'The American Way of Death' in 1963, to expose the abuses in the funeral industry, a groundswell of support for government intervention followed. Under President Ronald Reagan The Funeral Rule was first enacted to protect consumers from deceptive practices, but the rule has yet to put the nail in the coffin.

My 15 years of freedom have been harder than all of my death row years combined.

The fear of death comes from limited awareness.