My local public library recently acquired a copy of Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison by Daniel Genis. It’s a memoir of the author’s ten years in the New York prison system. I found it interesting, but ultimately not completely successful. Genis. Daniel Genis was born in New York to Russian immigrants. His father was a well-known literary and cultural critic in the Soviet Union, and he seems to have cast a long shadow in Genis’s life. Genis went to college at Columbia, where he studied history and French. After graduation, he worked for a literary agency and developed a heroin addiction. Criminal charges and sentence. When his drug use outstripped his income, Genis began committing armed robberies to support his habit. The robberies were covered briefly in the New York media, which dubbed him the “Apologetic Bandit” because he apologized to his victims as he politely robbed them. According to Genis, he committed 18 robberies, acquiring $700, before he was arrested. He pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years and three months. According to the NYSDOC inmate lookup page, he was also convicted of attempted drug sales, though I don’t recall Genis mentioning that in the book. Overview of prison experience. Genis served time at 13 different correctional institutions before being released in 2014. He was initially in maximum security facilities and moved to medium security for the last several years of his sentence. During his incarceration, he read over 1,000 books. Extrapolating from the works [...]
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