I wanted Blakinger to write more personally about her privilege: It must have struck constant cords of shame in her, as it has in me, to have had tremendous opportunities and yet land in a place where most had none. These journalistic digressions are informative, but the way she inserts them takes away from her own difficult experiences. For me, the lingering conflict in the book is when Blakinger telescopes out from her specific story and examines systemic racism in prison and policing, then brings it back to herself. To me, the fact that Blakinger has made a career of criticizing the institution that probably saved her life is the paradox of the book, one that she doesn’t acknowledge.

Blakinger’s privilege could easily have landed her among the astonishing number of dead white Americans who, like my brother Eugene, have overdosed during America’s generational opioid epidemic - a rate that exceeded the one for Black Americans until very recently. While white privilege did help her avoid scrutiny from the law, it also enabled a decade of uninterrupted hard-drug use. At times, I felt Blakinger was apologizing for writing about her lived experience in a criminal-justice system that disproportionately impacts people of color. In some of the flashback chapters, we’re yanked into wild scenes. With Corrections in Ink, you get what you came for. Its structure braids chapters about Blakinger’s jail time with backstory until her past catches up and we seamlessly find ourselves in prison alongside her.

Corrections in ink book