Iron House: Stories from the Yard

Rating:
Summary: If you have family working in the penal system, read it!
Review: Jerome Washington gives you a human outlook on societies "inhuman" population. It is a good read. If you have family in the penal system, on either side of the bars, you will have a different outlook on what they endure.

Rating:
Summary: Washngtons' stories, proactively narrated, are eye opening!
Review: Jerome Washington tells the stories that other sources have left out, or undetailed. Prison is a society, not just a group of people from the 'real' society. His own story is remarkable, giving him the unique ability to relate his observations to the reader. Washington strays from his own story as much as possible by examining the life of others confined to the same cage. Perhaps the pain of the recollection is the driving force of the reluctance to spill his own guts. He avoids it untill the end when he just can't hold back any further. Like all real quality writing, the author uses the language of the characters. The eerie result he may have intended has been achieved. The situations are scary, and the hope is bleek. The inmates are wild, hungry, and dangerous, and the prison employees are just as trapped - just as viscous: "They were angry that I was walking out of their prison alive ... and took false comfort in the hope that if I didn't return to prison, I would surely send my young to grow old behind their walls." Just as in other stories of prisoners or patients who believe the 'system' is corrupt, the reader must exercise his/her duty to examine the reality and the haze - and question what is perception, what is real, what is made up, and if the point of view is tainted by paranoia... why? You, the reader, will be a floating eye through a prison, through another world - with foreign rules, sanctions, and truths. And being seperated from the setting, although right there in the thick of it, you are safe from the prison's disease which spreads from animal to animal, through cage to cage, all the way to the to zookeeper.