Bricks on the floor, three stone walls, and that too-tight-wove metal door. A cage. I stood up and walked the length of my cage. Six not-angry steps long and then ’bout four wide.
Prisoner 88 is a 2013 children’s book by Leah Pileggi. In 1885, Jake Oliver Evans is ten-years old and convicted of manslaughter. For this, he’s sentenced to five years in prison. Adult prison in what was then the Idaho territory. He finds jail to be an improvement over life with his transient and alcoholic father. He’s able to eat every day and sleeps on a bed, a cot really, with a blanket.
I wish I could tell you this was fiction, but Pileggi’s novel was inspired by a visit to a retired correctional facility. The real Jake was a child convicted under tenuous evidence and sentenced to adult prison. Much of the story is based on actual accounts, events and characters of the time. Taken under the warden’s wing and protected by some of the other prisoners, Jake has a job tending hogs and learns to read. This is a coming-of-age book so he also learns life lessons that follow him into a non-criminal adulthood.
The notion of childhood as a protected time of life is relatively new. Up until the early twentieth century, children were considered small adults at best, chattel at worst. During the same era, children as young as five and six were laboring 16 hours a day in the factories of the northern and mid-Atlantic states. It wasn’t only systems, absent any support network and before the social reforms of the early twentieth century, a child in poverty had little hope of making it to adulthood, let alone a better life.
Jake received regular food and learned to read which made him better off than three quarters of the population at the time. He was apprenticed and then adopted. Though an extraordinary miscarriage of justice, Jake’s imprisonment likely ensured his survival.
Many of the characters are stereotypically written but Jake is an engaging, sympathetic and completely likeable narrator. His story is a fascinating account of prison life during that period from the perspective of an unlikely observer.
This is my final post in the series of blogs on books from each state. It took me two years rather than one, but like the tortoise, I did eventually finish.
I’m looking for another theme… perhaps screen adaptations of novels or child narrators; perhaps random thoughts from the pavement or runner’s “high” lights… hehe. We’ll see. I have a solid 15 hours to decide before the New Year.
ReDNeT Press 