Through photographs, interviews, statistics and other exhaustive research, photographer and first-time author Lankford captures from all angles the experience of women inmates confined to a typical jail in San Diego County. Interviews with jail officials, from deputies to counselors to directors, reveal exhausted, often jaded individuals who lack the resources to do their jobs properly; one deputy says that ""98 percent of inmates have drug histories,"" but funding levels barely keep inmates in food and housing, much less rehab programs. As such, California's ""three strikes"" law sends women to jail for life without ever offering them a chance at getting clean. Kristina Edwards came to jail pregnant on charges ranging from kidnapping to attempted murder, crimes she claimed she was too high to recall even being involved with; Lankford follows her progress, like other inmates', with care and compassion. Delivering her baby chained to a hospital bed, Edwards becomes a symbol of the cycle in which she's trapped, a fate often presaged by parental abandonment and neglect. Informative, frank, relentless and disturbing, the book's strong voices and stark format-black and white photos, transcribed Q&As, pull-quotes from subjects and experts-are completely absorbing, raising important questions about why women end up in jail and, too often, keep coming back.
–Publishers Weekly

Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes is an impressive book, impressive in that you will come away with an expanded and perhaps new impression of what life is like in a women's jail. Ms. Lankford is a photojournalist and this large format (~13” x ~10”) book is filled with stark black and white photos. It is not, however, just another coffee table book. The author follows the stories of real people and this book should be read, not just thumbed through.

Jails are very different than prisons. In jails, there is such a mixture of serious criminals and the truly innocent who can't post bail while awaiting trial. There are people there who should be in prison but are in jail because of the prisons' overcrowding. There are the mentally ill who need treatment, and there are those who pretend to be mentally ill so they can scam the system. It is a very mixed society, and difficult to deal with.

The author has a great deal of empathy for the people she interviews, but she doesn't get overly fluffy about it, does not excuse the wrong things that have been done by them. She does, however, explain how their early lives filled with poverty and crime made it more likely that these women would end up in jail and prison than most of us would. Of course, that isn't always the case. There was the well-educated interior decorator who charged thousands on a credit card that wasn't hers (oops, don't you hate it when that happens?). The book is also about how we, as a society, have not found the solution, how people who can be rehabilitated are often instead made worse by incarceration. Huge amounts of money and numbers of lives are wasted because we do not know how to handle these criminals.

This book is part of a trilogy that includes Downtown U.S.A., and the not-yet published Born, Not Raised, to be published in May 2011, and I look forward to reading both of those. This book is beautiful but I have one small quibble: although the layout is lovely to view, some of the text is too small to read easily, especially for such a large and heavy book. And I want to be able to read it all.

Thank you to the publisher (Humane Exposures) and the author for giving me a copy of the book. ( )