Book Review: Walker, J. (2004). Dancing to the Concertina's Tune: A Prison Teacher's Memoir. Boston: Northeastern University Press. pp. 207

• Published date: 01 March 2008
• Date: 01 March 2008
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0734016808314563
• Subject Matter: Articles

of religion, and facing execution. Chapter 17, “Scraping Away Hope, Faith and Dreams,” is

particularly interesting in suggesting that long-term occupants of death row may not be as

pleased by stays of execution or commutations to life without parole (LWOP) as abolition-

ists might think. Arriens notes in the introduction that LWOP “extends no hope for change,

reform or reward.”

These inmate writings are very readable and entertaining, though sometimes depressing

and disturbing. It is ironic that the authors only discovered great books, polished their writ-

ing skills, and developed their spirituality after being condemned as unfit to live among the

rest of us. Some remain vicious or hopelessly mentally ill, but many are arguably not the

same people who were put on death rows 10, 15, or 20 years ago.

Arriens’s edited volume does have some shortcomings. Including the introduction from

the first edition seems redundant, especially as the reader must leaf through a foreword,

preface, acknowledgements, and the new introduction before getting to chapter 1. The

chapters might be better organized and ordered. Chapter 5 is “Welcome to Hell,” even

though the case for the metaphor begins building much earlier. I found two chapters disap-

pointing because they contained the writings of only one inmate, but other readers might

disagree. Occasionally, “[sic]” is inserted in inmate writings with obvious mistakes, but in

other places it is not. The overall quality of writing is good enough that I believe the editor

should just edit and let the meaning prevail.

This second edition deserves to reach a broad audience, beyond “preaching to the choir”

of abolitionists. Public support for the death penalty, capital sentences, and executions all

seem to be declining recently, and, as I write this review, 127 innocent people have been

released from death row in the post-Furman era. If a significant downward trend in the U.S.

death penalty is really at hand, it would be fitting if the authentic voices of death row

inmates, some executed long ago, had a role in the process.

Michael R. Norris

Wright State University

Walker, J. (2004). Dancing to the Concertina’s Tune:

A Prison Teacher’s Memoir. Boston: Northeastern

University Press. pp. 207.

DOI: 10.1177/0734016808314563

“Tell the truth, but not the gory details” (p. 92). With this and similar sentiments, Jan

Walker’s memoir invites readers to engage in a series of narratives that complicate public

assumptions about prison teaching and shatter media-inspired stereotypes of incarcerated

people. When Washington State’s legislature mandated that educational access be extended to

incarcerated people in 1979, her teaching assignment as a Tacoma Community College faculty

member sent her to teach in prison. After 11 years teaching parenting and family courses to

women inmates, she was transferred to McNeil Island Correctional Center, a male facility

where she would continue to teach until 1997 when another state legislature eliminated par-

enting education from the curriculum. Thus emerges a story many in prison education know

124 Criminal Justice Review