An Insider’s Look at the Fourth Largest City in the U.S.A.

A Book Review by C.J. Muchhala

Recently, the New York Times reported on the four-month lockdown at Waupun Penitentiary, one of Wisconsin’s maximum security prisons where Friends from Milwaukee Meeting once met regularly with a group of incarcerated men. I was part of Milwaukee Friends Prison Visitation for nearly 20 years, and witnessed the gradual slide of an institution that offered opportunities for education, mental health and family visits into the conditions reported today. Obviously, the shortage of staff  is a driver of this lockdown, but what of the systemic flaws inherent in “legalized punishment” that lead to lockdowns, years of isolation in “the hole,’ riots, suicides, and deteriorating mental health, issues that grab headlines across this nation 

Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, edited by Doran Larson, offers a look at the system from the inside. It belies the caricatures of prisoners and prison life routinely encountered in television shows and movies.

 Larson says, “If gathered together in one place, incarcerated Americans would constitute that nation’s fourth largest city—a city larger than Houston, Philadelphia or Phoenix.” Hence the title of this book of first-person accounts by the men and women living in this “city.”

The book is divided into two parts: “Life on the Streets of Prison City” and “The Rules of Law, Policy and Practice in Prison City. “ Personal essays in each section detail the writers’ lives before incarceration, how they started on the road to prison and how they cope with life inside. They speak of friendship and of isolation, of relationships with family—or the lack thereof—and of the impact our current  prison system has on mental and physical health. Stories of remorse, of restitution made while incarcerated, and of reconciliation with their victims resonate. One question lingers: What is the goal of prison-endless retribution or the hard work of rehabilitation? Editor Doran Larson is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Hamilton College. He is currently creating the American Prison Writing Archive, an open-access digital archive of nonfiction essays by American prisoners, prison staff, the families of incarcerated people, and prison volunteers. He also edited “The Beautiful Prison,” a special issue of Studies in Law, Politics and Society, in which incarcerated writers, prison teachers, and critics imagine the look of a socially constructive prison institution. He has dedicated Fourth City “to all Americans who bear numbers for names.”