After the Madness:: A Judge's Own Prison Memoir

Former New York State chief judge Wachtler's contrite, compulsively readable confessional is an edited version of the prison diary he kept in 1993-94 while doing time for his obsessive harassment of his ex-lover, married socialite Joy Silverman, the stepdaughter of his wife's uncle. His bizarre letter-writing campaign to her resulted in his arrest in 1992, which made tabloid headlines. Writing with a mixture of eloquence and prickly self-pity, Wachtler attributes his ""unpardonable and shameful"" behavior to a diagnosed manic-depressive disorder, induced by abuse of prescription drugs, which led him to invent imaginary personas. His wife, Joan, and their four children, who stood by him, make intermittent appearances in the prison log that is by turns candid and self-conscious. Wachtler became surprisingly friendly with his fellow inmates--murderers, bank robbers, rapists, drug dealers, arsonists--some of whom he had sentenced. Along his rogues' gallery, we meet Jonathan Pollard, convicted U.S. spy for Israel; bibliomaniac Stephen Blumberg, who stole rare books; and porn kingpin Herbert Feinberg. Woven through these grueling daily observations, boyhood reminiscences and summary of Wachtler's achievements as judge, administrator and town councilman is a skein of attention-deserving proposals for reforming our prisons and judicial system. Author tour. (Apr.) FYI: Watchler has founded and heads a nonprofit mediation forum for the resolution of civil disputes.