Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison
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A memoir of a decade in prison by a well-educated young addict known as the "Apologetic Bandit" In 2003, fresh out of NYU, Daniel Genis was working in publishing as his writer father had always expected. But he was also hiding a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and burglary. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint in 2003, Daniel Genis was nicknamed the "apologetic bandit" in the press, given his habit of apologizing to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to twelve years (ten with good behavior), surviving the decade by reading 1,046 books, weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with various inmates, encountering violence on a daily basis, working at a series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him. Sentence is one of the most striking prison memoirs--and memoirs in general--in recent years--written with intelligence, wit, empathy, and remarkable style. Genis is the son of a famous Soviet émigré writer, broadcaster, and culture critic in Russia. He grew up in a home whose visitors included Mikhail Baryshnikov; Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov; authors Kurt Vonnegut, Umberto Eco, and Norman Mailer; and Czech film director Milos Forman. The education and culture so prized by his family were his lifeline during his decade in prison, and he describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system, from Rikers Island through a series of upstate institutions. He learns about the social strata of gangs, the "court" system that sets geographic boundaries in prison yards, how sex was obtained, the black market of drugs and more practical goods, the inventiveness required for everyday tasks such as cooking, and how debilitating solitary confinement actually is--all while trying to preserve his relationship with his recently married wife. Daniel Genis's debut has the potential to be both a critical and popular success, for few books have portrayed prison so vividly or with such insight.
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Reading this confirms that prison, being imprisoned, is a separate world. Trying to relate to that experience is difficult, as much as the author is unflinching with the details. [If I never read anything ever again with this level of human excrement mentions I'll be happy]. In this separate world, how can I fairly judge any actions the author took? There are passages that seem to suggest his experiences and maybe his base line beliefs/personality have made him too casual with language and perspectives that are offensive to me. Yet there are moments of enlightened thinking, there is the clear eyed acknowledgement of wrong doing without excuses. I did not expect the work to be more a reporting of various aspects of prisons and prison life, more than a study of the individual's interiority, as the author states in a last page addendum on chronology, “these pages are a distillation of what I had to learn about prisons, not an account of the travels of...” The books are less an after thought than a result of situations outlined. Instead of reading choices defining his time, his time defined his reading. There is something savvy in looking for books that would better help him understand his conditions, but it means the reading list can be dry and grim a lot of the time. There's a bit of the lit snob in his upbringing/education as well. I'm not sure I ever would have picked this up if I knew how it would handle the subject matter, but I can see the value in having this knowledge. It may be the American rather than the Canadian prison system discussed, but the broader implications function well as ammunition if I ever find myself okay enough with confrontation to get into discussions around prison reform/abolition. Even as the author regularly refers to international and historical prison conditions, and his own luck in not experiencing many of the worst things people hear about prison, as a method of acknowledging things could be worse, what's described is still by and large inhumane. NO ONE should have to exist like this.
⚠️ SA, major violence, racism, ableism, homophobia, disordered eating, mental health concerns, suicide
