053803: Life at Fifteen

Bookwire Review053803: Life at Fifteen is the frankly horrifying memoir of Robert Gagnon. Hoping to get access to drug and alcohol counseling by getting arrested, fifteen-year-old Robert held up a savings and loan with the help of a friend. Unfortunately, their simple robbery went wrong, and Robert wounded a bank employee in the resulting struggle. A prosecutor and hard-nosed judge conspired to get Robert tried as an adult; thanks in part to their manipulations, he was sentenced to life in adult prison in 1976 at the age of fifteen. A smart guy and a good judge of people, it didn't take long for Robert to learn how things worked inside the Florida correctional system. By listening to older inmates, he avoided most of the cons run on new inmates that ensured they wound up at the mercy of older men. Nonetheless, Robert found himself navigating brutal fights, gang wars, sexual violence, riots, and a corrupt system of prison guards and parole officers. As part of a relatively small population of white prisoners among a larger population of African Americans, Robert was told by an old-timer, ?Don't accept any loans and stay away from the blacks.' Robert describes a complicated system of sexual favors and violence, made even more volatile by the presence of crooked prison guards willing to beat confessions out of prisoners. Prisoners entertained themselves with casual acts of cruelty, such as exploding frogs in the machine shop and running mind games on other inmates. Robert was no exception. In a complicated plot to regain his lost status as head of the small machine shop, he invented a cult of Ra that sacrificed whatever animals it could find. It's a smart manipulation of his fellow prisoners, but the cruelty on display is stomach turning. Robert knew that many prisoners who were released couldn't cut it on the outside and ended up back in the system, so he devised ways to maintain his sanity. He devoted himself to learning auto mechanics so he'd have a trade. Ten years after sentencing, he walked out of jail and into freedom. Robert Gagnon is a good storyteller, and he certainly has plenty of material here. While typographical errors lend the book a less-than-polished air, they seem somehow not out of place in this nightmarish memoir. Gagnon seems to have escaped deep scarring from his time in prison; several appalling episodes are related with an almost devil-may-care insouciance. Even so, it's difficult to tell if the air of casual bigotry and cruelty has lodged itself in his personality, or if his references to ?sissies,? ?fags,? and ?hamsters? (a prison expression for African Americans) are just a device to recapture the flavor of prison language. Not an easy read, 053803: Life at Fifteen will be most compelling to those interested in the criminal justice system. BookWire Review July 27, 2006Robert J Gagnon is the author of '053803: Life at Fifteen', published 2006 under ISBN 9780977866205 and ISBN 0977866203.