The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison

I started reading The Funhouse Mirror up while I was waiting for a connection in an airport. I got so absorbed in it that I almost missed my plane. It is a collection of stories by prisoners in Washington State. Their pieces are remarkable, but what really makes the book are the interspersed commentaries and stories by the editor, Robert Ellis Gordon. Gordon spent several years working in the prison system as a writing teacher, and the prisoners who wrote these stories were his students. While the prisoners' stories are good, Gordon himself is a far more accomplished and vivid writer. Reading Gordon's own pieces really brought home to me the hell that is our prison system, and the difficult moral and emotional problems that it poses. This is a wonderful, gripping, depressing book that I recommend to anyone who wants to learn about what our prisons are really like.

This book is exceptional. The author is honest about the hideousness of the criminals crimes but never forgets their potential for humanity. The book is a testament to the power of love and the possibility for redemption. The author gives a lot of insight into himself, as well. I think all great books are honest. Truth speaks loudly. This is one such book.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the criminal justice system or who believes she/he understands it. Author Robert Ellis Gordon taught creative writing workshops to inmates in the Washington State Corrections System for 9 years. This powerful collection includes non-fiction essays and short stories written by Gordon and some of the incarcerated writers who were Gordon's students. Through stories and essays infused with emotional risk, startling humor, and vivid detail, the collection resonates as a testament to the intimate details of prison life. The collection offers no excuses for criminal behavior, but the inmates' writing reveals haunting histories and the daily combination of terror and tedium that makes up time served. In his own work, Gordon reflects unflinchingly upon the qualities of his students, many of whom are repulsive in their crimes (child molestation, rape, murder). Gordon describes challenging his students to "struggle back to life" by engaging in the vulnerable business of creating literature. And the inmates' work included in "The Funhouse Mirror" demonstrates the transcendent power of artistic opportunity. Gordon challenges the rest of us to examine the true nature of our corrections system and the the lives our society chooses to surrender to incarceration with diminishing hope of redemption.

The Funhouse Mirror, Robert Gordon's second book, is searing, funny, bitter, passionate and brilliant - a gripping read. Gordon, who taught writing in Washington State prisons for almost a decade, has collected a half dozen works of fiction and non-fiction by his students - including murderers and rapists - and interspersed his own commentary and stories. The inmates' work is stunning on two levels: the technical proficiency of their writing and the combination of brutality and humanity that they contain. The quality of their prose is presumably a tribute to Gordon's skill as a teacher and writer, which is reflected as well in his own essays and fiction. But it is the stories themselves that hold the reader's attention: stories of the countless gross and petty brutalities of prison, told with a clarity and insight that many more accomplished writers lack. Yet these stories brilliantly demonstrate the remarkable survival of basic human instincts in a dehumanizing institution. Gordon's book is ultimately but subtly political: he references only in passing the fact that the educational program that brought him into the prisons was eliminated as part of prison "reform." This is a short book, but one that will haunt you with the profound questions it raises about our prison system.

I came on this book entirely by accident--hearing the author read at a literary festival while I was waiting for something else. His stories knocked me out, as did the stories of two former prisoners who'd been part of his workshops. Prison's a world I don't think about much--most of us don't. Gordon takes us inside that world and shows us the human beings--without romanticizing or apologizing for their actions, but with such a sense of humanity that it helps us get past our stereotypes and fears. The real crime, as Gordon points, out, is that the kinds of education programs he teaches in work, but are now being cut. They drastically reduce the rate by which prisoners reoffend. They give them some connection to humanity which lets many find a different path. Yet these same programs are now being drastically cut all over the country, in the name of being tough on crime, including Washington State, where Gordon taught. I can't think of a greater short-sightedness.I've been talking this book up to teachers to community leaders, to all of my friends. Our political leaders need to read it, and so do we as ordinary citizens. It's a great read and a powerful resource that needs to get out.Paul Rogat Loeb, Author: Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time