LIVING WITH CONVICTION

Dorr’s debut memoir tells the story of how she fell in love with an inmate at Lansing Correctional Facility in Michigan and helped him escape—only to wind up in prison herself.

In 2004, the author founded a dog training program for incarcerated people called Safe Harbor Prison Dogs. She met convicted murderer John Manard through the program, and soon fell in love with him, which led to her helping him escape from prison in a dog crate. The pair spent 12 days together before they were caught by police, and the national news media, drawn to the dramatic details, followed Dorr’s story voraciously. Following her arrest and conviction, Dorr spent 27 months in the Topeka Correctional Facility in Kansas. During this time, she became close to several of her fellow inmates, who became good friends and sources of support when her family relationships were disrupted. Dorr realized how unhappy she was in her marriage and divorced her husband, with whom she’d had two children; she tells of how she became estranged from her two sisters, but that her relationship with her mother remained close. The writing is highly descriptive, though sometimes distractingly overwritten: “His words cut the breath from my lungs. I recoiled from the pain, as a five-year-old little girl thrust up to the surface to shelter me and take charge.” The pacing of the story drags in places; some of the more granular details could have easily been omitted without obscuring the author’s themes. Still, the work successfully illustrates the injustices of the prison system, as well as the resilience and resourcefulness of incarcerated people. Although Dorr describes her background as “privileged,” the prison experiences of her fellow inmates seem to vary only marginally, regardless of their backgrounds; as she points out, “prison budgets held no room for compassion.”

An earnest inside view of the prison system and one woman’s determination to thrive within it.