Tired, by Langston Hughes
It has been a hard week in the US, for those of us who believe the Death Penalty should be abolished. 5 state executions in 7 days.
I am sad, I am tired.
If you have not read the tagged by Angela Davis or The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander I really encourage you to even if you do not live in the states.
Reminder of how terrible these men have always been.
The book is good, though! An engaging history of Guantanamo in graphic anthology format. Recommended.
so-soAwkward. I was hoping for honest reflections on the role reading, engaging with books, can play in incarcerated people's lives, and that was part of the text. The awkward part was the author's realization that literature didn't play as big a role in their lives as in hers, that the book club was an escape that she seemed happy to be part of until confronted with its relative position in others' lives and ends on a self-pitying note. 1/4
pickSadly none of the five facilities he ended up serving his 9 year sentence in had any sort of rehabilitation programs. He was left on his own to maintain his sanity while also becoming an adult. Fortunately he had books that helped along the way though they were only part of his journey. After his release he attended Yale and becomes the founder of the FreedomReads.org program. This was very well written and enlightening. I highly recommend.
"And the thing was, the victims race was the whole point of the story. White cop, white victim. It didn't matter if the gun, the fear, the robbery didn't resolve the oppression that was felt as much as that we were passing on to each other a warped way of dealing with anger that we didn't know we had."
I have discovered my favorite style of non-fiction writing. Gut-wrenching situations written from the perspective of a journalist. I've read 3 books in this format and I gave all of them 5 🌟.
Do you have other similar recommendations?
Also, if you really get to know me, you would soon learn that I don't shut about about American Prison. It is infuriating yet somehow shocking. I promote it constsntly especially because I work with offenders.
Today's reading
pickA dense but tiny read. I am not sure what I was expecting but there is a lot of history of prisons and their creation. I have been flirting with prison abolition the last few years and this was very informative even if I knew some of the information before hand (I took many criminal psychology classes in college which took on things like the penopticon)
It was interesting and unexpected to read about Dickens being anti prison.
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