Books in Brief: Inside—Prison American Style

Inside—Prison American Style, edited by Robert J. Minton, Jr. (Random House, 325 pp., $7.95).

From New Jersey to Florida to Minnesota to California the cons are writing and telling their stories. Through fiction, poetry, autobiography and collections of letters, some as tender and beautiful as a rose petal, others as harsh and brutal as their authors’ homes, the reading public is being given an unprecedented glimpse into the prisons. Inside— Prison American Style is the latest and perhaps the best of these prison-spawned books. In a series of personal accounts and reports written by anonymous San Quentin inmates (their identities concealed to shield them from reprisals, official or otherwise) the reader is taken behind the walls, behind the official press releases and committee whitewashes, behind the bars and into the cells and workshops where murder, extortion, homosexual rape, and a rigid caste system are the facts of daily life, where the agonies of sexual starvation and loneliness are the inmates’ constant companions. Anyone who wonders why our prisons have failed, why society can count itself lucky if a man leaves prison merely unchanged, merely as bitter and antisocial as the day he entered, owes it to himself to read these stories of men forced to live in worlds of concrete and steel, where the rules often seem written by Kafka, administered by Eichmann, and designed to benefit no one. Reader reactions will vary. Some who would prefer not to know will be upset by the atrocities committed daily in society’s name; others may turn away in disgust, refusing to face the awful truth that those we call “criminals” are human beings who think, feel, laugh, love, weep and bleed like the rest of us; still others will be outraged and ashamed. But one thing every reader will have in common with every other reader— he will not be able to forget it.

ES

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E. Smith

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Inside—Prison American Style, edited by Robert J. Minton, Jr. (Random House, 325 pp., $7.95).

From New Jersey to Florida to Minnesota to California the cons are writing and telling their stories. Through fiction, poetry, autobiography and collections of letters, some as tender and beautiful as a rose petal, others as harsh and brutal as their authors’ homes, the reading public is being given an unprecedented glimpse into the prisons. Inside— Prison American Style is the latest and perhaps the best of these prison-spawned books. In a series of personal accounts and reports written by anonymous San Quentin inmates (their identities concealed to shield them from reprisals, official or otherwise) the reader is taken behind the walls, behind the official press releases and committee whitewashes, behind the bars and into the cells and workshops where murder, extortion, homosexual rape, and a rigid caste system are the facts of daily life, where the agonies of sexual starvation and loneliness are the inmates’ constant companions. Anyone who wonders why our prisons have failed, why society can count itself lucky if a man leaves prison merely unchanged, merely as bitter and antisocial as the day he entered, owes it to himself to read these stories of men forced to live in worlds of concrete and steel, where the rules often seem written by Kafka, administered by Eichmann, and designed to benefit no one. Reader reactions will vary. Some who would prefer not to know will be upset by the atrocities committed daily in society’s name; others may turn away in disgust, refusing to face the awful truth that those we call “criminals” are human beings who think, feel, laugh, love, weep and bleed like the rest of us; still others will be outraged and ashamed. But one thing every reader will have in common with every other reader— he will not be able to forget it.