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7/19/2010 10:07:12 AM
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Janet Hutchings
Posts 34
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Last week I tuned in, by chance, to National Geographic’s Locked Up Abroad, a series about travelers who find themselves incarcerated in penal systems a world apart from those of most U.S. states. The episode I caught featured a young American woman smuggling hashish from Nepal to Japan. Knowing (from the title) how it must end didn’t detract from the suspense generated by some incredibly realistic reenactments of the drug runs, but what fascinated me most was the episode’s window into the Japanese women’s prison system, considered the strictest in the world. Rationing of wash water, rules prohibiting daytime sleeping, a prescribed manner of sitting (including a prohibition against leaning back, even against a wall), and line-ups for roll call, distribution of mail, and so forth could all be seen as archaic from a Western point of view, and yet the young American convict seemed to credit the very restrictiveness of the rules with helping her to turn her life around.
I’m not aware of many contemporary novels in which the punishment part of our subject matter—crime—enters significantly. This is curious considering that the U.S. currently has the largest inmate population in the world, and what absorbs us in real life usually does find its way into fiction. Dostoevsky touched on the punishment of his character Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, but as an opportunity to explore the psychology of guilt and redemption. One might have expected the rising popularity of “noir” fiction, with its claim to be “character driven,” to have opened a door to probing, fictionally, the lives of prisoners and the effects of various prison systems today. However, the only EQMM writer currently mining that material (to my knowledge) is Clark Howard.
Maybe the scarcity of crime writers depicting prison life goes back to that old adage “write what you know.” Clark Howard knows prisons not through personal experience but from the many interviews with inmates he has conducted for his award-winning true crime books. And there are a few mystery writers who know prisons through having served sentences (Anne Perry in this generation and, in an earlier era, Chester Himes, for example). But the number of such writers is small, and no guarantee of interest in writing about the experience. A former EQMM contributor who began his career from a prison cell, Al Nussbaum (aka Carl Martin), once featured on the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted list— not the kind of list a writer usually brags about making, but Al proudly showed us his wanted poster. In the years I knew Al, he never wrote about inmates; his subject was usually the kind of crime for which he was put behind bars in the first place: he was, in his day, among the most notorious of bank robbers.
It’s possible that there are a lot of good contemporary novels involving prisons and prisoners that I’m not aware of, so please join in if you have some recommendations. If there really aren’t many such books being written, what do you think could be the reason?
Before I sign off this week I want to congratulate four authors who’ve won awards over the past three months for EQMM stories. Doug Allyn’s “Famous Last Words” (11/09) was selected for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award for Best Long Story; Dave Zeltserman received the Best Novelette Derringer for “Julius Katz (9-10/09); Dennis Murphy won Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story for “Prisoner in Paradise” (1/09); and Twist Phelan just last week was honored with the International Thriller Writers Best Short Story award for “A Stab in the Heart” (2/09).
Janet Hutchings
Editor
EQMM
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7/19/2010 2:16:14 PM
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Yoshinori Todo
Posts 232
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Yes, Locked Up Abroad (or Banged Up Abroad in the original British version) is fantastic! What makes it especially great is that the documentary makers film all the episodes in the countries they are supposed to take place in. Two of my favorite episodes are "Party Girl (India)" and "Mark and Paul's Story (Venezuela)." You can see most episodes on YouTube. Haven't seen the Japan episode yet, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banged_Up_Abroad
--
Josh
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7/21/2010 2:42:12 PM
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aw!tte
Posts 10
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Just FYI: Hulu has the complete second season of this show that you can stream for free: Locked Up Abroad
Unfortunately, the Japan one is not part of the Hulu library yet.
edited by aw!tte on 7/21/2010
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