My Review of "Writing My Wrongs"

Shaka Senghor had once dreamed of becoming a doctor, but after his parents separated and his mother began beating him, he left home and fell in with crack dealers.  After being shot himself, he took to carrying a gun, and one night, shot and killed a man whom he felt threatened by.  Before long, he found himself sitting in prison for murder.

Writing My Wrongs:  Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison recounts his story from violence to redemption.  Writing helped him atone for his wrongs -- and the life he had taken.  It also provided a respite from the harsh day-to-day realities of his cell.

Reading was also a refuge -- and what a refuge it became.  From Malcolm X's Autobiography to The Bible to the Quran.

But make no doubt about it, the writing and the reading would probably give us a false sense of life in prison.  So Senghor gives us a window into the violence that underwrites so much of the prison experience in America -- from rape and robbery to murder.  The Darwinian rules of survival kept him alive on the streets during the crack epidemic and the "laws of the jungle" defined his life in prison.

Writing and studying provided Senghor with a refuge from the chaos of prison and a growing awareness that he wanted to turn his life around.  It was a resolution galvanized by his correspondence with the godmother of the man he had killed, who told him she forgave him.

Senghor was released from prison on June 22, 2010, the day after his 38th birthday, and after a series of part-time writing jobs, he started a mentoring program for at-risk youth.  And writing became the way he explored what forgiveness, atonement and reconciliation might look like for himself and others like him.

This is a moving account that will challenge what you think about prison, felons and violence.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.