Review by Meghan Phillips
Danner Darcleight, author of Concrete Carnival (Permanent Press, September 2016), is a promising writer, a devoted friend, and a loving husband. He is also a convicted murderer and recovering heroin addict, serving 25 years to life in an unnamed prison somewhere in the United States.
Early in his memoir, Darcleight admits that his presence in a maximum security prison causes “cognitive dissonance.” White, college-educated, and a self-proclaimed “soft child of privilege,” Darcleight is an anomaly in a penal system with well-known racial and ethnic imbalances. Guards and even other inmates approach him, asking “what’s a nice guy like you….” Because he has a bachelor’s degree “in the land of pre-GED,” he works choice, high-paying (for prison) jobs clerking for well-placed civilians. What saves his memoir from being merely a fish-out-of-water tale is Darcleight’s awareness of and attempts to wrestle with both his place within the prison system and the guilt and grief caused by the crime that got him there.
While Darcleight’s life is undoubtedly the focus of his memoir, he uses his personal experience as an inmate to make broader observations about prison culture in the U.S., especially how people outside of the system view incarceration. The most striking example of this narrative technique is in a chapter titled “Male Gaze.” Darcleight’s memories of being “cracked on” (prison slang for being hit on) as a fresh-faced newjack lead to an examination of “one of the few prison issues the public has an appetite for”: rape. He criticizes pop culture, especially films and television shows, for using rape as a short-hand for evoking the “fear, powerlessness, [and] horror” inmates face, while also acknowledging that prison rape is a real problem.
It might be easy, even expected, for Darcleight to dwell on the bleakness of his life in prison; however, Concrete Carnival balances moments of darkness (of which there are many) with moments of lightness and, perhaps surprisingly, happiness. He describes with great warmth and detail the surrogate family that he has found in follow inmates Whit, Doc, and Yas.
But even while sharing a happy moment, like cooking dinner with his “family,” Darcleight never lets the reader forget that he is a prisoner and that these moments can disappear as quickly as they came: “What we never gave voice to was how precarious is living well in prison—a guard could have walked by, seen a can top I was using as a cutter, declared it a weapon, and carted me off to the Box.” Moments like this serve to jolt the reader back the reality of Darcleight’s situation. No matter how eloquent and intelligent he seems on the page, he is still an inmate. He is one of over two million people in prison in America today, most of whom never get the chance to tell their story.
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