moving self-portraits ( )

there are maybe 3 essays in here that are just outstanding, but actually all of them are worth reading. (and while a few of them aren't well-written, none of them are truly terrible.) all of them have something to show us about how people end up in prison, and many of them really show the injustice in the justice system. (2 of the women were in prison for homicide when they killed their abusers - their husbands, of course, who had been abusing them for years.) and how what these women need so often isn't prison but care. or how if we had any social services in place for them when they were growing up, that they could have avoided all that led them to prison in the first place.

this collection, i think, shows me that writing really can be taught, because these women came in without any knowledge about how to craft an essay. some of them left with essays the caliber of anything else i see published in the main journals. it's impressive and their stories are important. they weren't allowed to tell the stories of their crimes, but i think that maybe these are even more powerful, because they let us know how we have failed them and how society can do better to keep it from happening again and again, if we had any desire to actually help. ( )

Really nice book.
I finished this in awe the these women who have has such obstacles to overcome. The US penal system a hard system and i hope humans come to understand that it doesn't help to be hard on people with a hard life but either way they survive. I'd love to know them via email.

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories by women incarcerated in York Correctional Institution, Connecticut. I'm shifting away from my norm when I usually review each individual short story. These were all so good, I would say the same thing for each of them. I'll be reading I'll Fly Away, the 2nd book to this collection of stories, written by different women in York. This book was published b/c one of the women's instructor's was none other than Wally Lamb of She's Come Undone fame. The women were even sued for the cost of their incarceration by YCI because of the earnings they made from this book. The stories were not about the women's crimes, but about what in their lives caused them to commit their crimes: sexual abuse, physical abuse, drugs and gangs, just to name a few reasons. The writing really was exceptional! ( )

I know I only gave this 2 stars - I wish I could have rated each story in the book. I really liked a couple, but mostly I felt like it was just one big life lesson: people in prison aren't all bad, and a lot of bad things happened to those people to put them there. I knew why they were trying to make that point and I appreciated it but it got old after a while.

Also, this probably makes me a dick but I thought there would be more about the actual crimes commited and I was curious about that. ( )