From Publishers Weekly
A Village Voice staff writer's feature-turned-book about the impact of the Rockefeller drug laws on one family, this narrative begs comparison with last year's bestselling Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx. Like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Gonnerman has obviously done her homework. The story of Elaine Bartlett, a first offender sentenced to a staggering 16 years for drug trafficking, and the fate of her four children both during and after her incarceration, is told in encyclopedic detail, sometimes to a fault-including the entire texts of many letters, minutiae of clothing and even full grocery lists. Unlike LeBlanc's graceful prose, Gonnerman's style is utterly artless, occasionally to the point of awkwardness. But Gonnerman makes an excellent argument for the ways in which the New York criminal justice system, particularly the "tough on crime" measures imposed in the last three decades, fails poor and less educated people. She skillfully uses Bartlett, a tough, assertive woman who struggles to hold a job and keep her family together after their enforced years of separation, as an exemplar of the wide-ranging impact of incarceration on both ex-cons and the communities they leave behind, a social problem just beginning to be studied. This book takes its place as part of a current broad reconsideration of the war on drugs and the unprecedented prison-industrial complex it has created in America. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
For two and a half years, journalist Gonnerman shadowed recently released prisoner Elaine Bartlett, providing an intimate glimpse into the multiple difficulties associated with attempting to reassimilate into a society that is ill-prepared and often unwilling to assist ex-convicts. Convicted under the unforgiving Rockefeller drug laws, first-time offender Bartlett served 16 years in prison for selling cocaine. Attempting to reconnect with her four children, find a job, and acquire decent housing were all herculean tasks for the undereducated yet fiercely determined Bartlett. Although undeniably attached to her subject, Gonnerman nevertheless paints a fairly objective portrait of both her strengths and her failings as she struggles to overcome and conquer societal pressures and expectations. Refreshingly and bluntly honest, Bartlett eventually achieves a personal triumph when she becomes an eloquent activist campaigning against the brutally harsh drug laws that dictated her lengthy sentence. Guaranteed to raise both eyebrows and awareness, this powerful testament to tenacity raises important questions about this nation's inadequately funded and poorly designed reentry system for paroled inmates. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

ANNOTATION

Finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Life on the Outside is a riveting account of one woman's struggle to win her freedom and change her life; it is also an extraordinary feat of reporting, one that makes vivid the real-life effects of the rough justice meted out to the poorest of the poor. The book tells the story of Elaine Bartlett, who spent sixteen years in prison for a single sale of cocaine -- a consequence of New York State's controversial Rockefeller drug laws. It opens on the morning Elaine is set free from the women's prison in Bedford Hills, New York, after winning clemency from the governor. At age forty-two, having spent most of her adult life behind bars, she has no money, no job, and no real home. What she does have is a large and troubled family, including four children, who live in a decrepit housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. "I left one prison to come home to another," Elaine says. In the months following her release, she strives to adjust to "life on the outside": conforming to parole's rules, hunting for a job and a new apartment, and reclaiming her role as head of the household, all while campaigning for the repeal of the merciless sentencing laws that led to her long prison term.

In recent years the United States has imprisoned more than two million people -- many for nonviolent crimes -- while making few preparations for their eventual release. Now those people are returning to our communities in record numbers, coming home as unprepared for life on the outside as society is for them. Jennifer Gonnerman is one of the most talented journalists of her generation. With Life on the Outside she at once calls attention to a mounting national crisis and claims a place alongside the masters of narrative nonfiction writing, all by telling one woman's story -- a story of struggle and survival, guilt and forgiveness, loneliness and enduring love.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Most of this moving and well-reported book deals with Elaine's struggle to create a life for herself outside the prison walls -- by finding a job, a place to live, and by reconnecting with her thoroughly damaged family. This ground is familiar, but revelatory too, as when Elaine realizes that she has exchanged the prison behind bars for the prison that awaits ex-offenders who try to make it in the real world. — Brent Staples

The Washington Post

Rather than marshal statistics to flesh out an annual migration that may be the least-noted demographic trend of our time, Gonnerman focuses on the story of one woman, Elaine Bartlett, who served 16 years in New York state prisons on a drug charge before being granted clemency by Gov. George Pataki. The result, a remarkably balanced triumph of immersion journalism, is as gloomy as it is enlightening. — Michael Schaffer

Publishers Weekly

A Village Voice staff writer's feature-turned-book about the impact of the Rockefeller drug laws on one family, this narrative begs comparison with last year's bestselling Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx. Like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Gonnerman has obviously done her homework. The story of Elaine Bartlett, a first offender sentenced to a staggering 16 years for drug trafficking, and the fate of her four children both during and after her incarceration, is told in encyclopedic detail, sometimes to a fault-including the entire texts of many letters, minutiae of clothing and even full grocery lists. Unlike LeBlanc's graceful prose, Gonnerman's style is utterly artless, occasionally to the point of awkwardness. But Gonnerman makes an excellent argument for the ways in which the New York criminal justice system, particularly the "tough on crime" measures imposed in the last three decades, fails poor and less educated people. She skillfully uses Bartlett, a tough, assertive woman who struggles to hold a job and keep her family together after their enforced years of separation, as an exemplar of the wide-ranging impact of incarceration on both ex-cons and the communities they leave behind, a social problem just beginning to be studied. This book takes its place as part of a current broad reconsideration of the war on drugs and the unprecedented prison-industrial complex it has created in America. (Mar.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Compulsively readable account of a life wasted by the war against drugs but later reclaimed. Elaine Bartlett was a struggling 26-year-old mother of four when she impetuously agreed to carry four ounces of cocaine from the Bronx to Albany in 1983 on behalf of a dealer/informant who set her up to curry favor with the police. Rashly refusing a plea because it was her first offense, she received a 20-to-life sentence under the state's punitive Rockefeller drug laws. Village Voice staff writer Gonnerman constructs a propulsive, cleanly written narrative that considers Bartlett's plight in the larger context of how America's obsession with drug crime has blighted the prospects of multiple generations in the inner city. She documents Bartlett's 16 years in Bedford Hills prison: grappling with her rage, Elaine gradually became a model prisoner while educating herself about the drug laws, which seemingly existed to warehouse members of the minority underclass for nonviolent crimes. After intense lobbying, Bartlett was finally granted clemency by Governor Pataki in late 1999. She was determined to use her jailhouse celebrity to work on behalf of other Rockefeller law prisoners, yet soon discovered that a parolee's life in late-'90s New York was fraught with hidden pitfalls. Finding a well-paying job proved nearly impossible; her search for affordable housing was long and increasingly desperate. Elaine's cherished dream of finally being a mother to her children was also thwarted; she found they were young adults, raised in a volatile extended family and caught up with their own resentments and complications, including brushes with a criminal-justice system predisposed to go after the youthful poor.Gonnerman captures this angry urban milieu in clear-eyed, non-melodramatic terms. Elaine's story forces the reader to consider the toll exacted by myopic and effectively racist public policies that purport to address the social conundrum of illicit drugs in a market economy. Powerful stuff, grievously well rendered: Bartlett seems to be a remarkable survivor. Agent: David Black

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Alex Kotlowitz

Jennifer Gonnerman's Life on the Outside is that rarest of books. It informs both the heart and the mind. Honest and stirring, Life on the Outside will keep you reading through the night. And it will leave you shaking your head at our nation's thirst for rigid and unforgiving sentencing laws. This book is a triumph of storytelling. — author of There Are No Children Here and The Other Side of the River

Ken Auletta

Elaine Bartlett is a real person for whom conservative and liberal nostrums are unreal. Jennifer Gonnerman's searing book will drag you into a world where an ex-con like Bartlett, a mother of four, serves a ridiculous sentence for a first drug offense, then with no confidence, no job, and few skills leaves prison and struggles to survive. Gonnerman crafts a first-rate story with universal meaning from the particulars of Bartlett's life. This luminous book gets inside your brain and doesn't escape. — Media correspondent, The New Yorker, and author of Backstory: Inside the Business of News

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Through the remarkable Elaine Bartlett, Jennifer Gonnerman deftly maps out the middle passage of what is perhaps the most pernicious social injustice of our time. She charts a seemingly impenetrable intersection of problems, fact by brutal fact. Only writing and reporting of this caliber could track the intricate ways in which our nation's prison industry is also family business, and show how harsh sentences don't end on the outside. — author of Random Family

Russell Simmons

Life on the Outside is required reading. At a time when the prison-industrial complex is destroying African-American families and neighborhoods, Elaine Bartlett is more than a survivor: she is a heroine. The future of our communities depends on women like her. — founder of Def Jam Records and Chairman of The Hip-Hop Action Network