Corrections in Ink

January 1, 2022

A competitive figure skater who turned to heroin when her skating partner left her, Blakinger ended up on the street selling drugs and sex even as she attempted to finish a degree at Cornell. Arrested for possession, she spent two years behind bars, emerging sober, aware of her advantages as a white woman, and determined to expose the inequities of the prison system. Now she's an award-winning journalist.

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Starred review from March 7, 2022
A resonant call for criminal justice reform rings out from investigative journalist Blakinger’s extraordinary debut. When her figure skating partner left her in 2001, dashing their dreams of competing in the Olympics, 17-year-old Blakinger redirected her intensity on the ice toward self-destruction. After experimenting with drugs during a high school summer program at Harvard, Blakinger spiraled into a nine-year heroin addiction, turning to petty crime and sex work to support her habit. Still, she was “a dean’s-list student at Cornell” and writing for the school’s newspaper when, in 2010, her felony conviction for heroin possession made national headlines. Chronicling in unsparing prose the cruelties she suffered for nearly two years behind bars—where “you are nothing,” and “torture” prevails over “treatment”—Blakinger depicts the slow stripping away of her humanity, but she also writes of learning “how to steal joy in a place built to prevent it.” While her experience spurred her, after her release, to spend the next decade as a journalist reporting on U.S. correctional facilities’ vast failings, Blakinger resolutely notes how her “privilege” as a white woman enabled her to reclaim a life post-parole that many others aren’t afforded. Her self-awareness is bracing and her indictment of the prison industrial system raises searing questions around its punitive culture. This is absolutely sensational.

April 15, 2022
Keri Blakinger has held many identities: elite figure skater, Ivy League graduate, heroin addict, convicted felon. For the bulk of her teenage years, Blakinger was bound by mental health challenges fueled by a dogged pursuit of perfection. In this debut memoir, she shares her journey from competing as a promising young athlete to serving prison time. She writes of how her white privilege granted benefits that allowed her to leave prison relatively unscathed, especially compared to those she served time with who were not white and imprisoned at a disproportionate rate. A writing assignment with the Ithaca Times that Blakinger took upon her release eventually turned into an investigatory journalism career shaped by her advocacy for prison reform. Armed with her personal, experiential knowledge of the incarceration system, she now dedicates her time to those caught in it. Transferring powerful internal dialogue onto the page, Blakinger offers vulnerable, honest recollections, and a story that won't be forgotten and could even inspire much-needed change.

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Starred review from March 1, 2022
An investigative reporter reflects on the time she spent in the prison system for a drug crime. Growing up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Blakinger was a good student and promising figure skater who had dreams of competing at the highest level. However, her academics and athleticism concealed darker truths: an eating disorder and suicidal tendencies. When her figure-skating partner abruptly quit their doubles team, her skating career collapsed, plunging her into persistent depression, which she tried to address with drugs, eventually turning to heroin. Her habit continued until her senior year at Cornell, when she was arrested for possessing what was falsely reported as "$150,000 of smack." Following her arrest, Blakinger spent years in the prison system, where she not only got sober, but also received a firsthand education in the savage inhumanity of the American carceral system. "Behind bars, there are no rules. Sure, there is a rulebook and there are things you cannot do," she writes. "But when it matters, no one is watching....All the futility, the small cruelties, the refusal to see us as fully human--it was not a flaw in the system. It was the system." Upon her release, Blakinger became a journalist whose many reports on incarceration--for the Marshall Project, where she currently works, and previously for the Houston Chronicle and other outlets--have resulted in much-needed reforms. Throughout her narrative, the author emphasizes the privileges that enabled her recovery, and she shows her commitment to exposing the practices that make Black and brown prisoners much less likely to succeed. Blakinger's voice is frank but compassionate, as she lovingly but truthfully owns up to her mistakes. Her deeply researched analysis of the dehumanizing nature of incarceration is trenchant and infused with the passion of her personal experiences. The story moves quickly, populated with characters who are deeply flawed yet often sympathetic. A gorgeously written, page-turning memoir about addiction, prison, and privilege.

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