After two years in several prison facilities, journalist Brandon Stickney offers a tough look at what goes on inside America’s penal institutions.

Stickney was a writer who had an amazing stroke of luck when he was assigned to cover the blazing headline story of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. His book, ALL-AMERICAN MONSTER, was a hot property, but that success did not give him the satisfaction he craved --- a deep need that could only be salved with alcohol and, later, drugs. These needs sent him on a long, downward spiral, the only antidote of which was more of the same. He wound up in prison in midlife after selling drugs to an undercover officer.

"After two years in several prison facilities, journalist Brandon Stickney offers a tough look at what goes on inside America’s penal institutions.... This book --- sad, scary and, for all of us, significant in the facts it imparts --- is the result."

THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU’LL MEET IN PRISON chronicles his experience from the first day to the last. He leads readers through the shock effect of being shackled, confined and, initially, thought by fellow inmates to be a “rapo,” or sex offender, and therefore prey. He details the way that the system abuses prisoners, allowing the jailers, or C.O.s, almost unrestrained latitude in making the rules and breaking the bodies and spirits of inmates with every possible mistreatment --- from insults to torture to actual, if “accidental,” killings that go unnoted in the statistics.

Stickney quickly learned gangsta-speak, threaded his way through daily routines that constantly changed, survived on a diet of mainly soy products, and formed alliances that made the hell more tolerable. There was Bear, a seasoned inmate who befriended him in the first and subsequent facilities; “Pastor” Mark, whose Christian faith contrasted with his record as a sex offender; Gummy, who stepped in with useful tips for survival; Gandhi, a roving addict whose philosophy gave a sense of intellectual calm to the brutality of the system; and a plainspoken guard named Valefor, whose counsel brought Stickney a modicum of comfort amidst the chaos.

Told through his prison diaries with flashbacks to his earlier, alcohol- and pill-besotted life, Stickney provides disturbing statistics regarding the American penal system, which, in the recent era, has been glutted with drug users, with “big pharma” greatly to blame. Though he was (not surprisingly) rather standoffish about the kind of help he was given within the system, certain required trainings and therapies such as AA meetings helped him toward his release. But the biggest factor that gave him real hope was the kindness of his parents, who offered to give him a home in Florida after his release and sent him numerous, meaningful packages of reading materials and artwork. Doubtless, too, his ability to write almost every day about his experiences was a saving grace.

This book --- sad, scary and, for all of us, significant in the facts it imparts --- is the result.