TIME SERVED

Cromwell, in her debut memoir, writes of her career as an employee in a major prison system.

In 1994, the author began her training at the Richard A. McGee Correctional Training Center in Galt, California. As a divorced single mother, Cromwell wanted a stable career with benefits to support her 9-year-old-daughter. What followed was more than two decades working for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County, and the California Institution for Men, working her way up to a management position as a correctional captain. Although Cromwell’s account sometimes gets mired a bit too deeply in the mechanics of how the correctional system works, her writing is notably fair and balanced, providing insights into the human side of the prison system and the lives of workers and inmates. For example, she discusses the complexities of friendships at work—particularly the problems of cliques forming between coworkers and of getting too close to prisoners. Included is a difficult story of Cromwell being investigated for “over-familiarity with an inmate” when, in fact, it was a friend at work who’d become entangled in such a situation; the author discusses the impact this had on her relationships with her colleagues. She also provides a thought-provoking account of what happens—both logistically and emotionally—when a prison worker knows someone in their personal life who becomes an inmate. Cromwell writes with introspection, reflecting on her own childhood in South Central Los Angeles, during which she visited prisons to see relatives. An important, well-developed theme is the author’s experience as a Black woman working in the justice system; she tells of being racially profiled when she first worked at Juvenile Hall; later, she became the only Black female captain at California State Prison, Los Angeles County. She engagingly details her continual struggle to find good work-life balance, contributing to a wider conversation about working mothers by exploring her unusual career path; in Cromwell’s own words, “Nobody says they want to work in prison when they grow up.”

A compelling and personal story of the world of corrections.