Review by Booklist Review
More money is spent in the U.S. on prisons than on education; these ruminations from prison "graduates" show us the service we're buying. The book begins with writings on early prison systems that illuminate their goal of moving black slaves from the plantation to the penitentiary to create a cheap and captive labor force; then there is a section on efforts to reform early prisons, which includes pieces by such notable ex-cons as Jack London, Chester Himes, and Nelson Algren. Later writings include pieces by Norma Stafford, Kathy Boudin, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. This startling collection reflects everything from the evolution of slave songs to prison work songs to some of the most strident, insightful critiques of the U.S. political and justice systems: women imprisoned for advocating birth control, black men imprisoned for the penury of enforced sharecropper farming, vagrants imprisoned for joblessness during the Depression. A revealing look at the long and harrowing history of prisons in the U.S. at a time when so many are advocating more prisons and longer sentences. --Vanessa Bush
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Harrowing in their frank detail and desperate tone, the more than 60 selections in this anthology of writings about the prison experience in America pack an emotional wallop. According to Wicker's outspoken foreword, "prisons and the violence and despair they symbolize... are a blot on American life and history." The U.S. penal system contains a population greater than that of New Hampshire, and even the pretense of rehabilitation was long ago subsumed by the need to punish. Beginning with accounts of the victims of Jim Crow and Black Code laws in the segregationist South and going through the contemporary journalism of Dannie Martin and Mumia Abu-Jamal, these views from behind the bars should be required reading for anyone concerned about the violence in our society and the high rate of recidivism. Franklin, in his introduction, argues that the institution of slavery has its modern counterpart in penal servitude While he sometimes seems stuck in the clichs of a New Left rhetoric, he has done a fine job of rediscovering the prison writers of the 1920s (a period of real flowering among convict writers, supported by H.L. Mencken's American Mercury magazine) like Jim Tully, Chester Himes and Ernie Booth. In this context, the more famous works of writers such as Nelson Algren, Malcolm X and Jack Henry Abbot, gain a fuller resonance. The book also highlights writers, like Piri Thomas, who are alive today but neglected. If the test of an anthology is whether it makes the reader want to pursue the works of the authors it presents, this provocative volume definitely qualifies. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
