A review by henrygravesprince
Inside Knowledge: Incarcerated People on the Failures of the American Prison by Doran Larson

challenging informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

5.0

In the interest of full disclosure, this review is specifically regarding a DRC copy of the book from Net Galley, so while I imagine this eBook was pretty close to finalized, some details may have been changed between my copy and the official release.

I would recommend this book to prison abolitionists interested in centering first-hand accounts in their activism and people who are on the fence about full prison abolition but willing to listen. The strongest aspect of this book is most certainly in its “cellular reading” format and the prison witness letters themselves. As for the weakest aspect, I’m not sure I can really provide insight on that. Considering the nature of this book, I can’t really make any suggestions of how to improve it. For example, as much as I would love an even wider array of people’s accounts at hand, such statements would depend entirely on prison witnesses having the resources to write and send them, which is unfortunately not always the case. I would be willing to read more of Larson’s work in the future, but more than that, I’m interested in reading more of the work from the American Prison Writing Archive.

The overall throughline here is that prison is not an effective way of bringing about change or preventing future harm. I appreciate that it’s both a text that is willing to make the reader uncomfortable in a productive way, while still acknowledging the reasons people are resistant to the idea of abolition, in order to walk the reader through the thought process away from those misgivings. Each chapter has its own subtopic and specific aim, and each is necessary to the text. While the chapters are jam-packed with information and quotes, I believe that’s an important aspect of this book compiling, essentially, evidence via these witness statements. It not only provides a lot of evidence backing the point, it allows them to share a diverse and thus more well-rounded representation of the prison population. Outside of the prison witness account excerpts, the grammar and style is consistent and academic, lending even more to the effect of preserving the statements as-written.

As I mentioned, I really appreciate the “cellular reading” methodology employed in this text and the way it was crafted because of that. When I started reading the book, I had assumed it would be a collection of individual essays by prison witnesses. Instead, it compiles different excerpts of prison witness writings related to one topic and walks the reader through them, often allowing the incarcerated people to speak for themselves while also providing necessary context like sources, studies, statistics, etc. This book is incredibly meticulously crafted with a careful and intentional hand, from its format to the editing (or lack thereof—the words of prison witnesses are preserved as they were written, including grammatical errors, which lessens the distance allowed to the reader from the writers as people).
Expand filter menu Content Warnings