SENTENCE

A memoir of incarceration, literature, and redemption.

For one week in August 2003, 25-year-old Genis robbed people at knifepoint to support his $100-per-day heroin habit. Although he immediately told his victims he was sorry, the “Apologetic Bandit” was given a 12-year sentence—10 with good behavior— by a judge who thought the White, middle-class NYU graduate “should have known better.” In a sharp, wry memoir, the author, a journalist and translator, chronicles his life in a dozen compounds in upstate New York, including four maximum security prisons, a world “utterly unknown” to those outside prison walls. He reflects on some of the 1,046 books—by Dostoevsky, Primo Levi, Solzhenitsyn, Proust, among many others—that he read while an inmate. “Reading’s evolution into writing,” he found, “made the difference between merely surviving ten years of incarceration and finding meaning in it.” Each chapter focuses on “a specific demographic slice of the incarcerated population”—Blacks, Latinos, gang members, and the mentally ill, for example—or a facet of prison life, such as food, solitary confinement, methods of smuggling in drugs and weapons, rare conjugal visits, and the particular cruelties of being transported on prison buses. Like an anthropologist, Genis sees prison “as a laboratory to study how men self-organize into societies, and watching that development is effectively a look into our Stone Age past.” He notes the codes, behaviors, assumptions, and prejudices that factored into group affiliation. “Race,” he writes, “mattered to an extent I had never witnessed previously. It was both a reason to oppress and to redress perceived wrongs.” As a White man, he found it impossible to “not have some relationship with the concept of white power. One cannot be neutral on the subject; the other prisoners do not allow it. Being white means being a minority, and a hated one at that.” The author’s voice is insightful, candid, and sometimes darkly humorous.

A vivid portrait of endurance behind bars.