Our broken system - and two memoirs to prove it.

Whew!

I haven't posted in a long time - I've been reading up a storm, however. Since I last posted I finished a book called Orange is the New Black, a memoir about a woman's year in prison, and I am now almost finished Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, a harrowing non-fiction account of a family and their hell-ish experience during the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina.

The books are so different in tersm of writing and perspective - one, written by a upper-class, college educated white girl, experiencing the system and having the luxury of viewing it as almost an observer or voyeur (Kerman can lean back and observe the goings on with a critical, almost journalistic eye, and this is sometimes unsettling - but the real bonds she makes with the other prisoners makes up for this strange perspective); and a Syrian man, innocent just the same, but thrust into the system and being forced to experience all of it in a very real, very deliberate way.

But wow, do they both show the horrors of our nations dark under-belly that is the judicial and prison system. For most of us law-abiding, productive members of society, prison represents order, safety, and peace of mind. I know better, because I have worked in San Quentin and in two juvenile prisons in Michigan - but still, even so, I look at the prison system and somehow, inherently, trust it. After all, there are parts of it that work, and it's pretty much out of sight, out of mind, right??

Both of these accounts show, in a brutal, real, raw way. It's an exposure of a system that generally doesn't work, filled with papers, people, frustration, and debacles like the ones the Zeitouns or Piper Kerman were subjected to are everywhere. It's enough to make me not want to get out of bed each day.

Reading Orange is the New Black, I was brought back to my time in San Quentin. The men that I met there mirrored the women that Kerman showcases in her memoir - their individuality, their humility, their strength. But what the book did that I couldn't do was delve a bit deeper - I only got to see the surface in a few hours, once a week.

More on Zeitoun as soon as I'm done - only a few pages away.