Description

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*Silver Medal, 2015 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards, Best New Voice*

*Finalist, Memoir, 2015 Maine Literary Award*

In this gripping nonfiction account, Robert Reilly provides a look inside America’s prison system unlike any other, and the way that it affects not only the prisoners themselves but also the corrections officers and their families.

After 13 years of struggling in the music business, Robert Reilly found himself broke and on the edge of despair. The specter of success in the music business had become a monster about to ruin his family life. Something had to change, or something was going to break beyond repair.  

A chance conversation with a neighbor led him to apply, somewhat half-heartedly, for a job at the county prison. Although he hated the thought of a “real job,” a regular salary of $40,000 with benefits, and paid time off seemed like a small fortune. “Amazingly, I somehow got hired. So, in an effort to do the right thing and put my family first, I left the madness of the music business and entered the insanity of the U.S. prison system.”

Robert Reilly served a seven-year term as a prison guard in Pennsylvania and Maine. Entering America’s industrial prison system in search of a way to support his young family, the struggling musician found himself in a looking-glass world where, often, only the uniforms distinguished guards from prisoners.  Life in Prison chronicles the horrors of a place where justice is arbitrary, outcomes are preordained, and the private sector makes big money while the public looks away.  This is Reilly’s story of doing time.

To call the experience sobering would be the ultimate understatement: “As time crawls by, I become jealous of the inmates leaving the prison. I start to slip; I start to feel like I’m losing my faith. Any trace of innocence that I thought I still had starts to evaporate. I begin to feel trapped, imprisoned, locked in a dark heartbreaking world, just like an inmate.”

About the Author

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Born in England, Robert Reilly worked as a prison guard for six years, leaving the corrections system in 2007. Today he lives in midcoast Maine with his family and works as an outdoor education instructor.

Praise For…

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This is a must read
for anyone interested in a truly authentic look at life behind the walls.
— Lt. D. L. Croley, Prison Inspector, PA Dept. of Corrections

He holds nothing
back, relating a hellish experience in gripping, scary detail, well-earned page
by well-earned page. Reader be warned: There’s no escape from Life in Prison.
— Hodding Carter, author, A Viking Voyage and Off the Deep End

Robert Reilly is a
born and inspired storyteller who knows his craft as well as he knows his
subject. His voice is an authentic howl, as true as a blues singer’s coming out
of the swamps of hell.
— Peter Nichols, author, A Voyage for Mad Men and Evolution’s Captain

Take a man, an
artist, musician, writer, and cast him down into the stone steel hell of
prison, but not as an inmate, as a guard, with all the pressures and dangers
and bizarre human interactions inherent in that situation and you have the
setting for a powerful, brutally honest and inspiring book that will touch,
shock and ultimately heal all those who read it...
— Billy Hayes, author, Midnight Express