RaveThe Washington PostEven before opening to the first page, I suspected that an oral history of Rikers would be fraught because of who gets to speak. Would it just be those who suffered? Or would we hear from guards and how they treated people? ... Rikers answers those questions by demonstrating that there is not a single story of the place ... But Rikers is far more than just a collection of the stories of people who have served time there or worked there ... These pages, in their purposeful lack of objectivity and their specificity, become, through the sheer number of maddeningly similar tales, more honest than a piece of scholarship might ever be. The cacophony becomes not the story of any particular person but that of the brick and mortar and barbed wire of a disaster built on a garbage dump ... Unflinching.
Richard Wright
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... feels wearily descriptive of far too many moments in contemporary America ... More than any other Black writer, Richard Wright recognized that understanding Black folks’ relationship to the police is central to understanding racism ... The underground strips the markers of his identity just as any prison sentence does. And so, while the book is no longer concerned with the police and arrests and beatdowns, Wright forces readers to ask what the cost of this freedom is ... shows us that even when we survive those interactions, ducking the immediate dangers of incarceration or death, we can find ourselves bewilderingly stuck reliving the moment, struggling to find our freedom.
Jason Hardy
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewA struggle to be seen governs these pages—though, sadly, Hardy, for all of his good intentions, is often the one who fails to see ... More than half of The Second Chance Club passes before Hardy realizes that his \'judgments were based on glimpses\' and that he \'missed way more than I saw.\' The same could be said of this book—a story based on glimpses, that misses far more than it sees ... In Hardy’s book, the word \'offender\' appears 488 times. \'Offender\' becomes interchangeable with a person’s name, a flag announcing Hardy’s (and our own) unwillingness not to stigmatize people who have a criminal conviction. As a writer, he should understand how the repetition of \'offender\' transforms a person into a stereotype; as a P.O., he should know that those under his supervision deserve the dignity such repetition denies. But he fails, miserably, and that failure isn’t just a reflection on him but on all of us, because it is not just Hardy who fails to see beyond the stigma ... where Hardy misses the point is that he presents the ridiculously incongruous as representative ... purports to be a story about men and women on probation or parole, but mostly it exposes a system so bereft that it takes inexperienced and ill-prepared employees, grants them the authority of guns and handcuffs and expects them to serve as mentors, therapists, employment coaches and substance abuse counselors, all without training or resources. Such a system can’t help ruining everyone it touches.
