This is a revealing and challenging first-person piece, an excellent and affecting example of its genre. The overall impression is of an environment that is loud, jarringly loud; replete with inmates (if this diarist is representative) whose potential to change/make amends is being squandered by the prison system. The piece is filled the mundane details of daily life behind bars: smoke breaks, watching ricki lake, endless hours in the cell. The diarist is honest and intimate, and the piece is seamlessly constructed.