Book Review of Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison by Shaka Senghor

While I'm not Black, male, or possessed of a criminal record, the topic of Writing My Wrongs by Shaka Senghor is a very personal one to me. A member of my immediate family went to prison on felony charges when I was in elementary school, and was gone for what felt like half a lifetime. In Writing My Wrongs, Senghor describes a life on the street in which he had many things working against him. An unstable home, abuse, and choosing to leave that environment as a teenager led him to live on his own. After quickly learning that his lack of even a high school diploma would make it impossible to support himself independently, Senghor was offered a chance to get into drug dealing on the lowest level, and he took it. His autobiography is the story of what happened next.

For those of us who have never been incarcerated, we can only gather secondhand information about what it is actually like. Senghor has one word which sums up the experience eloquently: dehumanizing. There are things this book does not do well. After reading it, I still cannot explain why anyone would choose to tell a story like this in such a fragmented, out-of-order way, with no cohesive timeline for the narrative. Every time I reached a new chapter, I longed to re-order all of them so that I could read chronologically, which I felt would've made more sense, and also helped me understand Senghor's journey through the underbelly of Detroit's east side in the 1980s and the American Prison System. Also, there were several small inconsistencies within the narrative. They didn't discredit Senghor's message, but they were frustrating and distracting, and I felt they would've been easily caught and fixed by an editor who was a bit more on-the-ball.

Ultimately, though, Writing My Wrongs is a book with much to offer. Senghor speaks from a population which has traditionally been ignored. Senghor spent a total of nineteen years in prison, seven of which were in solitary. How many books have been published by writers who have committed multiple violent felonies? I don't have the statistics, but I read widely, and I've only heard of a handful. He offers up his own life as an example of how easy it is to make bad choices. Senghor freely admits that he isn't perfect, and he is eager to point out where his thinking was flawed. More than anything, desire to be a good person, a decent role model, and a positive father figure came from this book in waves. Writing My Wrongs both gives an important perspective on the failings of the U.S. Justice System, and a personal look at a life partially wasted. Though the writing itself isn't artful, it is compelling, honest, and important.

I don't usually include other links with my book reviews, but this is a short informative video about Mass Incarceration in the US, and I feel it sets the stage nicely for Senghor's story. Thank you to Blogging For Books for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.