If you’re looking for a little light reading to enjoy on the beach, then "The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison" is not the book for you. On the other hand, if you want a factual, gritty account of what life is really like in one of America’s toughest prisons, then read on...
Author Pete Earley was allowed unprecedented access to Leavenworth Penitentiary, the Kansas institute where the hardest of hardened criminals serve their time. Over a two-year period, he conducted hundreds of interviews with prisoners and staff alike and his book profiles some of the prison's most notorious inmates and their crimes as well as vividly portraying daily life behind bars.
This is a world where violence and desperation rule. A world where a sociopath, Thomas Silverstein, is kept with "no human contact" as, in the words of a bureau official "We cannot execute Silverstein so we have no choice but to make his life a living hell."
It's a world where "...there are no nice guys", one in which the hostility between guards and prisoners often results in "thump therapy" from the guards and attacks and murders from the inmates. It's noisy, chaotic and always menacing. And, most of all, it's the kind of world that 'normal' people just can't imagine existing - until reading this book.
The very subject of "The Hot House" means that, as you would expect, it contains accounts of some disturbing events and plenty of four-letter words. However, it is a real report on real people, a unique and powerful journey into a living hell. It's a shocking book, but one that is compelling at the same time. In short, it's a masterpiece of investigative journalism, one that manages to place you right inside the prison behind bars with various assorted low-life as your companions.
Publisher: Bantam Books
ISBN:0553560239
Price: $7.50 / £4.66 p/b
Date Reviewed: May 2003
My Rating: 4.5/5
