Kwame Kilpatrick: Can he get it right this time?

At first glance, I thought, he should fade away into the sunset. But now, I think he may have something to say. Of course, most people have all the right words tosay when they are in jail. The true test comes when you get out. I hope his foundation is solid enough this time to withstand all of the temptations.

During the past year that Kwame Kilpatrick has spent in Michigan prisons, Detroit's ex-mayor has had plenty of time to ponder the divide between a once-promising public service career that included shaking hands with U.S. presidents, but now gets spent rubbing elbows and swapping tales with murderers, rapists and common thieves.

It has been in those lonely hours that he thought about what he did right and wrong as mayor, and how those actions impacted the future of the city, Kilpatrick told The Associated Press Thursday in a telephone interview from behind bars.

"You have conversations with yourself," the 40-year-old Kilpatrick said from Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson County. "You bounce ideas off yourself. It's just you and the walls. What you learn is that there are the potential for greatness and potential for evil in each one of us. You begin to have conversations with both of those individuals."

Kilpatrick continues to serve up to five years for violating probation in a 2008 criminal case that followed charges of perjuries for lies he told on the stand a year earlier during a civil lawsuit. Married, Kilpatrick denied having an affair with a top aide.

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