Wynn presents a penetrating exploration of inmates' lives in New York's "vast penal colony," Rikers Island. She directs the Correctional Association of New York's Prison Visiting Project at Rikers, a formidable, sprawling jail; there, she teaches writing and edits the Rikers Review. Wynn claims working at Rikers has turned her "from a dispassionate journalist into a... compassionate" advocate for prison reform. Her bright, optimistic style seems incongruous with the institutionalized darkness she depicts, however. Her deep commitment to viewing prisoners as the downtrodden among us is supported by the jail's own stark statistics, which indicate that most of the inmates are impoverished minority residents of the city's "dead zones," areas with the highest murder rates, and that many are stuck in the hard cycle of drug addiction and drug-related crime. Wynn uses firsthand narratives of prisoners she's worked with to illustrate the Kafka-esque difficulties convicts face on the road to rehabilitation. Her lively prose, with its refreshing lack of "street" pretensions and her emphasis on the forlorn dignity in humanity subjugated by large-scale imprisonment, make this an unusually stirring example of the "teacher in prison" subgenre and a worthwhile companion to books like Ted Conover's NBCC Award–winning Newjack
and Joseph T. Hallinan's Going Up the River,
released earlier this year. Her portrait of Rikers as a miniature, punitive Gotham is colorful and complex; moreover, it forces us to acknowledge the inequalities and intricacies of life behind bars, which those ex-convicts continue to face once they step off this island, headed for either prison upstate or to freedom. Agent, Noah Lukeman. (July)
