He was influenced to open the museum after a visit to Alcatraz prison in San Francisco,California.

VOA: special.2010.05.05

The day I visited the prison-turned-museum, a woman was outside it selling T-shirts, one printed with "Good Morning Vietnam" in red letters.

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On Sunday, parents, siblings, friends and loved ones gathered before monks in a courtyard of the prison site -- now a museum -- to participate in a ceremony to honor the dead.

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"I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body, " Charles Dickens wrote in the 1840s after he visited that Philadelphia prison, which is now a museum.

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