Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison

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