Books behind bars: five of the best stories about prison life
From Alan Sillitoe’s inspiring story of a long-distance runner to memoirs about what life is really like on the inside, author and former inmate Erwin James shares his favourite books about crime and prison
Books about crime and prison are often among the favourite reading choices for people in jail. Howard Marks, who died of cancer this week, wrote a classic of the genre with his autobiography Mr Nice. First published in 1996, it chronicles Marks’s international drug smuggling activities and his seven years in a US prison. Since then, Mr Nice has been one of the most borrowed books in prison libraries. As a former prisoner, I have read many books on the subject – not to mention written a couple. Among the best are the following five:
In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison by Jack Henry Abbott
Abbott’s book came about when he wrote to the author Norman Mailer when Mailer was researching the serial killer Gary Gilmore. Abbott’s letters to Mailer became this book. His prose is mesmerising in its strength. The life Abbott describes, from his childhood in reformatories to his time in prison for murder in 1965 at the age of 21, is turned into a poetic tragedy. It is compounded when he killed again six weeks after he was released in 1981. Abbott’s description of the dynamics of the prisoner hierarchy shows how universal the effects of incarceration can be.
Prisoners of Honour by David Levering Lewis
Prisoners of Honour is a forensic examination of the trial, imprisonment and eventual exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus. Lewis’s blistering narrative, interspersed with the evidence of the antisemitic conspiracy that put Dreyfus away, brings life and insight to the case like no other account. The French army captain was convicted of treason in 1894 and sentenced to life on Devil’s Island, a place barely bigger than a palm tree’s shadow 10 miles off the coast of French Guiana. Dreyfus, an innocent man wrongly condemned to a hellish existence in a tiny prison built especially for him, offers an inspirational lesson in integrity and courage. Before prison, I lived without both these traits. I read Prisoners of Honour in prison and it changed the way I thought about life. Dreyfus made me want to be a better person.
No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker
Bunker was a former career-criminal and prison escapee who became a writer and actor (he played Mr Blue in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs). No Beast So Fierce was the key to his final escape to a crime-free life. It is an angry novel about criminality, violence and the challenges faced by prisoners trying to reintegrate into society, along with the obstacles that abound on the path to “going straight”. It is written in a fast-paced, authentic style that draws on Bunker’s experience of the low life of Los Angeles. James Ellroy was so impressed with it that he described it as “perhaps the best novel of the Los Angeles underworld ever written”.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe
This titular tale in this short story collection follows a boy called Smith who is sent to borstal for robbing a bakery. There he becomes a cross-country runner – such a good one that he becomes the governor’s hope for a PR coup when Smith is pitched to race in a competition against students at a local public school. In the race he streaks ahead of the field, only to stop yards from the finishing line in a supreme act of defiance that demonstrates the freedom of his mind and his spirit against the bleak and repressive borstal regime. Sillitoe understood that you can imprison the body, but the mind will always be free.
In the Place of Justice by Wilbert Rideau
Rideau served almost 44 years in prison before he was released in 2005. Rideau was originally convicted of murder and sentenced to death in 1961 when he was 19. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when the death sentence was temporarily abolished in Louisiana in 1972. Rideau spent the majority of his sentence in Angola State Penitentiary (also known as the Farm), where he started writing a column about prison life called The Jungle. Rideau went on to become editor of the Angolite, the prison’s award-winning magazine. In 1998 he helped to produce an Oscar-nominated documentary about Angola State, titled The Farm. The story of his life in this deftly written book is an example of what can be achieved in the direst circumstances with just a positive attitude and a pen.
Erwin James’s book Redeemable: a Memoir of Darkness and Hope is published by Bloomsbury.
- What are the best books written about prison time? Leave your recommendations in the comments below.
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