Another successful find from my recent trip to Freebird Books has been an early edition of Lewis E. Lawes’ 1932 memoir, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing. I can’t get enough of that chummy, “let me give it to you straight, folks” style from autobiographies of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties. Those two decades are my favorite for both books and film, I think primarily because most writers at the time had either lived through the Victorian era or knew lots of people who did, and had a resulting “gee whiz, anything’s possible” perspective on human relationships, scientific progress, and criminal justice as a result. I will say that the copy I scored has unfortunately lost its dust jacket:
Saw Guy consumes my waking thoughts. 6 (?!) small saws? How small exactly? Where were they? WHAT was the "fortunate circumstance" that led to their discovery? How many times do we think he WASN'T caught smuggling small saws?
This is a harmful, dangerous review and I think you should take it down immediately. Huge amounts of money and labor go into creating prison propaganda that humanize the people doing the terrorizing, and this quite recent book (not even 100 years old!) exemplifies that practice. Violence committed against "criminals" (which both you and Lawes patronizingly render as a different species from those of us privileged enough not to have been personally affected by the carceral state) is anything but quaint or whimsical. Do you realize that the quotes you've pulled describe acts of horrific brutality, committed against actual human beings trying to defend the last shreds of autonomy of which they haven't been deprived? Your snide tone betrays your ignorance and myopia about this topic at best and your lack of basic empathy at worst.
It's painful and enraging to see you mine Sing Sing for comedic content. I fail to understand what you think was so funny about this place, even as it existed *all the way back* in 1932 (?!). In case you're not aware, it is very much in operation today, with over 1500 people isolated from their loved ones and subjected to 24/7 state-sanctioned torture within its walls, and everything about its current form as a site of racist, fascistic repression takes its precedent from the policies of every prior warden, including the "chummy" reformist Lawes. If you agree with his impossibly hypocritical closing statement that there should be fewer and smaller prisons, the last thing you should be doing is giving so much affectionate airtime to this depiction of a large and notorious one.
If you are truly interested in learning about the history of prisons and prison reform in America, I recommend reading Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. Please feel free to get in touch if you don't understand what I'm talking about; I'm happy to discuss further. In the meantime, although I love almost everything you've ever written (I can honestly say that your work has changed my life), and I'm sad to go, you've lost a paid subscriber.
After all the wonderful stuff in this post, the thing that stuck with me was, “Who puts PEPPER on corn on the cob?”
Saw Guy consumes my waking thoughts. 6 (?!) small saws? How small exactly? Where were they? WHAT was the "fortunate circumstance" that led to their discovery? How many times do we think he WASN'T caught smuggling small saws?
This is a harmful, dangerous review and I think you should take it down immediately. Huge amounts of money and labor go into creating prison propaganda that humanize the people doing the terrorizing, and this quite recent book (not even 100 years old!) exemplifies that practice. Violence committed against "criminals" (which both you and Lawes patronizingly render as a different species from those of us privileged enough not to have been personally affected by the carceral state) is anything but quaint or whimsical. Do you realize that the quotes you've pulled describe acts of horrific brutality, committed against actual human beings trying to defend the last shreds of autonomy of which they haven't been deprived? Your snide tone betrays your ignorance and myopia about this topic at best and your lack of basic empathy at worst.
It's painful and enraging to see you mine Sing Sing for comedic content. I fail to understand what you think was so funny about this place, even as it existed *all the way back* in 1932 (?!). In case you're not aware, it is very much in operation today, with over 1500 people isolated from their loved ones and subjected to 24/7 state-sanctioned torture within its walls, and everything about its current form as a site of racist, fascistic repression takes its precedent from the policies of every prior warden, including the "chummy" reformist Lawes. If you agree with his impossibly hypocritical closing statement that there should be fewer and smaller prisons, the last thing you should be doing is giving so much affectionate airtime to this depiction of a large and notorious one.
If you are truly interested in learning about the history of prisons and prison reform in America, I recommend reading Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis. Please feel free to get in touch if you don't understand what I'm talking about; I'm happy to discuss further. In the meantime, although I love almost everything you've ever written (I can honestly say that your work has changed my life), and I'm sad to go, you've lost a paid subscriber.