Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

A resonant call for criminal justice reform rings out from investigative journalist Blakinger’s extraordinary debut. When her figure skating partner left her in 2001, dashing their dreams of competing in the Olympics, 17-year-old Blakinger redirected her intensity on the ice toward self-destruction. After experimenting with drugs during a high school summer program at Harvard, Blakinger spiraled into a nine-year heroin addiction, turning to petty crime and sex work to support her habit. Still, she was “a dean’s-list student at Cornell” and writing for the school’s newspaper when, in 2010, her felony conviction for heroin possession made national headlines. Chronicling in unsparing prose the cruelties she suffered for nearly two years behind bars—where “you are nothing,” and “torture” prevails over “treatment”—Blakinger depicts the slow stripping away of her humanity, but she also writes of learning “how to steal joy in a place built to prevent it.” While her experience spurred her, after her release, to spend the next decade as a journalist reporting on U.S. correctional facilities’ vast failings, Blakinger resolutely notes how her “privilege” as a white woman enabled her to reclaim a life post-parole that many others aren’t afforded. Her self-awareness is bracing and her indictment of the prison industrial system raises searing questions around its punitive culture. This is absolutely sensational. (June)