Before entering the Federal Bureau of Prisons facility in Lewisburg PA in July 2012, I thought about how I was going to spend my fourteen and a half months of incarceration in a way that would keep me busy, focused, and healthy. One way I realized those goals was through my work as a GED (high school equivalency) and ESL (English as a Second Language) instructor. The other was by reading a lot, beating my pre-prison goal of reading a book a week. As to those books, I ended up finishing sixty-five books in sixty-two weeks, focusing on history, politics, social media/public relations, as well as resource material to help me be a better tutor.
In the prison system, there’s an e-mail portal. It’s not the internet—e-mail only, and it’s slow and expensive, but it does work. And each inmate is allowed to have up to 30 people on their e-mail list. So, what I started doing was sending to all 30 recipients my book reviews, about every five books or so, as a group e-mail blast. It was a good exercise for me, as setting out to do those reviews made me read the books more carefully than I might have otherwise, taking careful chapter and summary notes. It also gave me something to do requiring mental focus and discipline, to move the day along, and it didn’t require anyone or anything else. That’s always a good thing when you are in prison, as trouble tends to come in groups. When this practice started, some family members joked for me to stop, as possibly distracting my e-mail recipients, who had better things to do than read “reviews from the lockup.”
