A finely crafted, thoughtful look at the modern-day morass of America’s prison system.
McClintock and Soutter’s novel follows John Greaney, a psychotherapist working in Pennsylvania’s violent prison system.
After losing his job at a state mental hospital that was burned down by one of his patients, Greaney finds work in Pennsylvania’s rough and tough prison system. Mostly he’s at a maximum-security prison, though he also does a stint at a medium-security prison and visits others. The book starts with a bang—an ex-con confronts Greaney at a bar—and the action continues almost nonstop as he works with and fends off a variety of intimidating, crazy criminals ranging from murderers, rapists, and pedophiles to one or two inmates wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. Character studies here delve into the diversity of personalities—from the practically benign to the pathologically monstrous—and paint a bleakly dismal portrait of prison and its denizens as well as the difficult positions for prison psychotherapists. Often hated, gamed, or attacked by prisoners, they garner little sympathy from the guards who are supposed to protect them but who look upon them as naïve bleeding hearts. A proponent of blunt honesty and tough love, Greaney succeeds in counseling some prisoners but concludes that his job is futile. The work is making him as mad as his clients. He begins drinking heavily, gaining weight, and having violent fantasies; eventually, he seeks professional help. This gritty account of the cruel realities of modern American prison life is notable for its insightful character sketches and its detailed descriptions of prisons’ physical and emotional brutality, not to mention the blundering bureaucracy and the American public’s heedlessness. Sharply focused and tightly written, the book makes for a riveting read, though the authors can’t seem to decide whether prisons and prisoners can be reformed or are beyond redemption. Perhaps the conclusion is that American crime and punishment may be one more problem with no solution. But the novel presents a forceful case that America’s prison system is making the most incarcerated population on Earth worse rather than better, endangering not only prisoners, but those who work with them, not to mention the public at large.
A finely crafted, thoughtful look at the modern-day morass of America’s prison system.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500934132
Page Count: 260
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.
A former Justice Department lawyer, who now devotes her private practice to federal appeals, dissects some of the most politically contentious prosecutions of the last 15 years.
Powell assembles a stunning argument for the old adage, “nothing succeeds like failure,” as she traces the careers of a group of prosecutors who were part of the Enron Task Force. The Supreme Court overturned their most dramatic court victories, and some were even accused of systematic prosecutorial misconduct. Yet former task force members such as Kathryn Ruemmler, Matthew Friedrich and Andrew Weissman continued to climb upward through the ranks and currently hold high positions in the Justice Department, FBI and even the White House. Powell took up the appeal of a Merrill Lynch employee who was convicted in one of the subsidiary Enron cases, fighting for six years to clear his name. The pattern of abuse she found was repeated in other cases brought by the task force. Prosecutors of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen pieced together parts of different statutes to concoct a crime and eliminated criminal intent from the jury instructions, which required the Supreme Court to reverse the Andersen conviction 9-0; the company was forcibly closed with the loss of 85,000 jobs. In the corruption trial of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a key witness was intimidated into presenting false testimony, and as in the Merrill Lynch case, the prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense, a violation of due process under the Supreme court’s 1963 Brady v. Maryland decision. Stevens’ conviction, which led to a narrow loss in his 2008 re-election campaign and impacted the majority makeup of the Senate, seems to have been the straw that broke the camel's back; the presiding judge appointed a special prosecutor to investigate abuses. Confronted with the need to clean house as he came into office, writes Powell, Attorney General Eric Holder has yet to take action.
The author brings the case for judicial redress before the court of public opinion.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61254-149-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Brown Books
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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