Description
Book SynopsisWhen Ben Langston took a guard job at a local prison, it was because there were few other options.
Jail Speak is his memoir about working in the incarceration industry.
Trade Review“Ben Langston’s memoir offers a clear-eyed and revelatory look into the lives of incarcerated men and those who are charged to guard them. His experiences inside this secluded world debunk the uninformed narratives outsiders hold as truths and bring to light stories brimming with empathy.
Jail Speak is a poignant, remarkable book.”
“
Jail Speak is a wrenching, authentic, and haunting account of life inside the state prison where Langston worked as a corrections officer for three years. In terse, eloquent prose, Langston spares no detail as he transports readers inside, where he translates ‘jail speak,’ the vernacular of men in prison—both the inmates and the guards—and exposes the profoundly troubling day-to-day reality of the prison industrial complex.
Jail Speak is a heartbreaking, viscerally honest, timely, and critically important book. If you read only one book about prison, make it
Jail Speak; you will not find a more acutely truthful, intelligent, and deeply moving narrative about life behind bars for prisoners and their keepers.”
“Prepare to be uncomfortable, to be challenged out of your certainties, to confront realities you’ve successfully ignored or diminished, to peek into obscurities of human attitudes and behaviors. But also prepare to be overwhelmed with literary power, and even beauty amidst ugliness, a subtle earnestness amidst all the layers of irony and self-protecting distancing. For underneath the narrator’s bravado is the writer’s bravura. All of this, and more, awaits between the covers of Ben Langston’s masterful evocation of
Jail Speak.” * author of Disparates *
