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In 2003 Daniel Genis, the son of a famous Soviet émigré writer, broadcaster, and culture critic, was fresh out of NYU when he faced a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and ultimately crime. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint, he was nicknamed the “Apologetic Bandit” in the press, given his habit of expressing regret to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to twelve years—ten with good behavior, a decade he survived by reading 1,046 books, taking up weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with his fellow inmates, working at a series of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him.
Genis describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system. In his journey from Rikers Island and through a series of upstate institutions, he encounters violence on an almost daily basis, while learning about the social strata of gangs, the “court” system that sets geographic boundaries in prison yards, how sex was obtained, the workings of the black market in drugs and more practical goods, the inventiveness required for everyday tasks such as cooking, and how debilitating solitary confinement actually is—all while trying to preserve his relationship with his wife, whom he recently married.
Written with empathy and wit, Sentence is a strikingly powerful memoir of the brutalities of prison and how one man survived them, leaving its walls with this book inside him, “one made of pain and fear and laughter and lots of other books.”
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 22, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593289792
- File size: 391837 KB
- Duration: 13:36:19
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 1, 2022
Journalist and translator Genis's debut memoir chronicles the ten years that he spent in the New York State prison system after committing a series of knifepoint street robberies. A white, college-educated Jewish man, the son of Russian intellectuals, Genis was new to the justice system when he was handed a hefty 12-year sentence. During his time in prison, he read and studied 1,046 books--this "made the difference between merely surviving ten years of incarceration and finding meaning in it." Each chapter of Genis's memoir focuses on a different topic related to prison life--solitary confinement, prison gangs, the smuggling of drugs and weapons, conjugal visits, and the many creative ways to cook, share, and trade food. Genis's stories, which he narrates himself, are fascinating, shocking, and deeply thought-provoking. Listeners will laugh with him during his most outrageous stories and will be moved by the compassion and frustration in his voice as he raises pointed questions about the inequities in the justice system and the absurdity of current methods of rehabilitation. VERDICT This sometimes raunchy but always insightful memoir will have wide appeal. Recommend for those who will appreciate Genis's darkly humorous take on this timely topic.--Sarah Hashimoto
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from December 6, 2021
A man does hard time with the help of literature in this striking and soulful debut. Journalist Genis revisits his stint in New York State prisons from 2003 to 2014 after committing a string of knife-point street robberies to fund his heroin habit at the age of 25, when he was also working at a Manhattan literary agency. (His remorseful demeanor got him dubbed “the Apologetic Bandit” by the press.) His gritty picaresque features jail-yard fights (“You don’t have to win the fight or stab to kill, just show up”); witnessings of attempted murders and suicides; routine humiliations (“My orifices were rudely peered into, a part of the process supervised by a man wielding a club,” he writes, recalling his entry at New York’s Downstate Correctional Facility); squalid conjugal visits with his wife; and much Kafkaesque absurdity (he was sent to solitary for purchasing other inmates’ “souls” with cups of coffee, which violated rules against commercial transactions). Counteracting boredom and despair was his reading list, which included Sartre’s No Exit—a schizophrenic cellmate brought home the play’s declaration that hell is other people—and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which taught him that memory was the antidote to the inevitability of losing time. By turns harrowing and mordantly funny, Genis’s account illuminates how the written word helps humanity endure in the stoniest soil. Photos.
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