Corrections in Ink
A Memoir
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4.3 • 42 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Brave, brutal . . . a riveting story about suffering, recovery, and redemption. Inspiring and relevant.” —The New York Times
An electric and unforgettable memoir about a young woman's journey—from the ice rink, to addiction and a prison sentence, to the newsroom—and how she emerged with a fierce determination to expose the broken system she experienced.
Keri Blakinger always lived life at full throttle. Growing up, that meant throwing herself into competitive figure skating with an all-consuming passion that led her to nationals. But when her skating career suddenly fell apart, that meant diving into self-destruction with the intensity she once saved for the ice.
For the next nine years, Keri ricocheted from one dark place to the next: living on the streets, selling drugs and sex, and shooting up between classes all while trying to hold herself together enough to finish her degree at Cornell. Then, on a cold day during her senior year, the police caught her walking down the street with a Tupperware full of heroin.
Her arrest made the front page of the local news and landed her behind bars for nearly two years. There, in the Twilight Zone of New York’s jails and prisons, Keri grappled with the wreckage of her missteps and mistakes as she sobered up and searched for a better path. Along the way, she met women from all walks of life—who were all struggling through the same upside-down world of corrections. As the days ticked by, Keri came to understand how broken the justice system is and who that brokenness hurts the most.
After she walked out of her cell for the last time, Keri became a reporter dedicated to exposing our flawed prisons as only an insider could. Written with searing intensity, unflinching honesty, and shocks of humor, Corrections in Ink uncovers that dark, brutal system that affects us all. Not just a story about getting out and getting off drugs, this galvanizing memoir is about the power of second chances; about who our society throws away and who we allow to reach for redemption—and how they reach for it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A resonant call for criminal justice reform rings out from investigative journalist Blakinger's extraordinary debut. When her figure skating partner left her in 2001, dashing their dreams of competing in the Olympics, 17-year-old Blakinger redirected her intensity on the ice toward self-destruction. After experimenting with drugs during a high school summer program at Harvard, Blakinger spiraled into a nine-year heroin addiction, turning to petty crime and sex work to support her habit. Still, she was "a dean's-list student at Cornell" and writing for the school's newspaper when, in 2010, her felony conviction for heroin possession made national headlines. Chronicling in unsparing prose the cruelties she suffered for nearly two years behind bars—where "you are nothing," and "torture" prevails over "treatment"—Blakinger depicts the slow stripping away of her humanity, but she also writes of learning "how to steal joy in a place built to prevent it." While her experience spurred her, after her release, to spend the next decade as a journalist reporting on U.S. correctional facilities' vast failings, Blakinger resolutely notes how her "privilege" as a white woman enabled her to reclaim a life post-parole that many others aren't afforded. Her self-awareness is bracing and her indictment of the prison industrial system raises searing questions around its punitive culture. This is absolutely sensational.
Customer Reviews
Okay.
This book was okay. It was repetitive at times.
Insightful. Informative. Captivating.
It’s a page turner. Thanks Keri.