Blame

By Michelle Huneven
Picador

Michelle Huneven’s Blame spans twenty years in fewer than 300 pages but avoids any frantic pacing or strange leaps. Patsy MacLemoore, the main character, is an alcoholic. A young academic, her scholarly accomplishments initially help to balance negative effects of her alcoholism. Huneven’s protagonist has a professorship at a at a small liberal arts college. She had a small but sunny house, friends, family nearby, and was pretty, with long blonde hair, long tanned legs and a dazzling smile. At the county jail, the regular inmates call her “Professor” when she wakes up there after having had too much to drink.

When Patsy wakes up in jail—again—she assumes she’d simply had too much to drink; perhaps she’d driven even though her license had been revoked. She tries joking with the officers, the lawyers. She’d blacked out—again—and doesn’t know what she’d done to land in jail. “What is it?” she asks, “I really don’t remember. Did I kill someone?” She’s joking. Then they read her the police report. A mother and daughter, killed in her driveway, hit by a car.

Patsy pleads guilty and goes to prison. Huneven’s depiction of prison is sobering and not heavy-handed. She doesn’t romanticize Patsy’s prison experience, but neither does she withhold from her readers the moments of grace Patsy does experience there. In prison, Patsy sobers up, leaves prison and returns to town.

Patsy loses many friends, but miraculously (isn’t friendship and forgiveness always a miracle?), she is not left completely alone. Her ex-boyfriend visits her every week, becoming one of her most faithful and loyal friends. Her parents are gentle with her. Her brother looks out for her. When she leaves prison, she comes home to an apartment lovingly appointed by her best friend and his boyfriend. She meets an older man in AA and remains sober, gets married. Many years later, Patsy learns what happened when she blacked out in the car that night. That new information changes Patsy’s new and hard-won self-perception.

I didn’t want this book to end. The story isn’t incomplete, not by any means. Huneven’s feel for just the right bit of detail was wonderfully effective. I felt attached to these characters, their lives and stories, their back-stories, and their private moments very early on and simply wanted even more by the time the book ended. I loved them. I loved the depth with which Huneven wrote them. I am a sucker for stories depicting people who are deeply flawed but who are nevertheless very much loved. This was one of those stories and I hope to find another one like it again.

Review by kristina grob

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

By Piper Kerman
Spiegel & Grau

Piper Kerman recounts the nightmare that is the judicial system in her memoir Orange Is the New Black. This is a gentle introduction to life behind bars compared to the stories of other less fortunate prisoners. Kerman spent one year of her life in a minimum-security federal women's prison in Connecticut for money laundering. Surprisingly, the worst events didn't even happen within the prison itself. She was indicted on a minor drug charge committed ten years prior; she then had to wait another five years to even be sentenced.

Her jail experience wasn't as bad as she thought it would be, though it was no vacation. Piper was subjected to humiliating strip searches, strict rules, nonsensical regulations, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment by her boss while she was working hard as a prison electrician. She later had to finish her yearlong sentence by traveling via the notorious Con Air, and staying at other worse prisons in order to testify. On the (very slim) bright side, she learned vital life lessons from other prisoners. Kerman recalls these women and her friendships with them through tender sentimentality and brutally succinct detail.

I felt very touched by the solidarity of prisoners, as well as the descriptions of holidays and birthdays spent in prison. The women found joy doing one another's hair and nails. They also enjoyed craft projects, such as tailoring their prison uniforms, creating blankets for family, and (on one funny occasion) a crocheted yarn replica of a penis as a gag gift for another prisoner. They also cooked with the few resources they had, and a recipe for Prison Cheesecake is included in the book.

Most importantly, the author owns up to her own personal privilege. Piper is a self-described "blond-haired, blue-eyed, bohemian WASP," and a Smith College graduate. She realizes how infuriating the treatment from the system was for her, and how it wasted years of her life. However, she often proclaims how much worse it would have been if she were not a privileged white person with a private lawyer. She feels for her fellow prisoners, most of whom face dismal options and impossible challenges. Prison does little to educate offenders of their crimes and does not prepare them for the outside world once they are finally released.

In reality, prison does little to rehabilitate those who commit non-violent crimes, and there seems to be little distinction between the treatment of non-violent and violent offenders. In this memoir, it is noted that the minimum and maximum security prisons were within close proximity of each other and often traded inmates back and forth. I agree with Kerman that those who commit non-violent crimes would be better remedied, and more beneficial to the community, if they were ordered to do multiple years of community service instead of traumatic and expensive ($30,000 per year per inmate) prison time.

Orange Is the New Black is engaging, educational, moving, irritating, funny, morose, and extremely hard to put down.

Review by Jacquie Piasta

Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

By Rickie Solinger, Paula C. Johnson, Martha L. Raimon, Tina Reynolds, and Ruby C. Tapia
University of California Press

Surprise—it’s a real downer to read about prison. That glaringly obvious statement aside, Interrupted Life is quite an achievement. The book comprises eighty-seven pieces, which are written by scholars, activists, incarcerated women, and formerly incarcerated women and span breadth of generic types. There are poems, reflections, and essays; there are excerpts from research, a Bill of Rights, a United Nations Report; there are journal entries, excerpts from interviews, vocabulary lists, and letters to lovers. There are so many perspectives, experiences, reflections, assertions, and expressions that no one point of view is easily privileged, and the reader who may try to do so would have to try very hard to lump everything in this book into one picture of the "standard" incarcerated woman. This, of course, is one of the goals of this book: to resist readers' attempts to maintain a generalized view of who the incarcerated woman is or what she is like.

I admire the honesty of Ruby Tapia's introduction. She directly admits that any representation of incarcerated women—even of a single incarcerated woman—will necessarily fail to convey fully what her experience means to her and how it feels to her. Likewise, it will also fail to fully show how such a representation relates to the larger social, political, and economic problems of justice, the category of the "criminal," and the overwhelming homogeneity of economic class within prison populations. She insists that creating a representation of incarcerated women—even such a nuanced, heterogeneous representation as the book attempts—is still to reproduce the categorical violence done to incarcerated women by setting up a space in which "we" (non-incarcerated, non-criminal/criminalized readers) can take a leisurely look at "them"—"they" who exist outside of the laws that bind us into a group that can evaluate the criminalized other, who cannot evaluate us in ways that count.

Interrupted Life makes a provocative and accessible (if continually heartbreaking) book for the lay reader. The future professor in me can't help but imagine this book as a text for introductory level courses in philosophy, women's studies, multicultural studies, justice studies, political science, criminal justice, economics, or sociology. The readings are not too difficult for undergraduate students to understand and the many perspectives lend themselves to lessons in critical thinking. For advanced students, the readings in this book could challenge—or confirm—more highly theorized academic studies about justice, prisons, gender, and the experiences of incarceration.

Review by kristina grob

Girl Trouble

Directed by Lexi Leban and Lidia Szajko
New Day Films



Girl Trouble gives a glimpse of the underbelly of The City By the Bay. Set in San Francisco, this is not a story about the hippies of Haight Asbury, nor is it a tale of the modern liberal Mecca so many of us assume it to be. In fact, Girl Trouble could be set just about anywhere in the United States. The film follows three young women whose lives are entrenched in cycles of violence and who can barely keep their heads above water, let alone enjoy the splendors of the world around them. One attorney in the film explained it perfectly: "These girls live in a city where, from any point, the ocean is no more than seven miles away, yet they have never seen it."

Spanning four years, examining the ins and outs of the juvenile justice system, the audience follows Stephanie, a new mother battling domestic violence; Sheila, a drug user and dealer who comes from a family riddled with violence and addiction; and Shangra, who sells drugs to support her homeless mother. The girls are tied together by their mutual experience working at the Center for Young Women’s Development. The Center’s mission is to “empower and inspire young women who have been involved in the juvenile justice system and/or the underground street economy to create positive change in their lives and communities.” The three girls, to varying degrees and at very different stages, all eventually do make positive change in their lives. We see the continuum of that potential change amongst them with one essentially submitting to fate, one petrified but embracing recovery, and one starting her life anew.

Girl Trouble makes a clear case for the benefits of intervention in individual lives over prosecution, and highlights discrepancies within the system. According to the film, girls make up twenty-three percent of juveniles in the system nationwide, and less than five percent of the funding goes towards programming for young women, the fastest growing segment of the juvenile justice system. Stuck in the cycle of violence, girls can end up bouncing from group homes to survival crimes and back again. The film shows how people need a second chance to see that another path is possible and that jail does not provide girls with rehabilitative opportunities.

Review by Nicole Levitz