Jail Speak

by Ben Langston

“Call me what you want—corrections officer, C.O., guard, jailcop, turnkey—I helped keep people there against their will. For this, the jail rewarded me with food.” When Ben Langston took a job at the State Correctional Institute at Rockview, it was because there were few other options. At his previous job—putting labels on water bottles—he did not have cups of human waste thrown in his face. He did not have to finger sweaty armpits in search of weapons. There were no threats against his life. But the jail paid better. Jail Speak is a memoir written from a guard’s perspective. It’s about the grind, about dehumanization, drama, punishment, and the cycles of harm perpetrated by the prison industry. It’s about masculinity and conformity and emotional detachment. It’s a look at the inside that you didn’t want to know about, and it’s for mature audiences only. Know your limits.

240 pages, Paperback

Published June 12, 2020

Reviews

[Maureen Stanton · Rating 5 out of 5]

JailSpeak is a wrenching, authentic, and haunting account of life inside the state prison in Rockville, Pennsylvania, where Langston worked as a corrections officer for three years. In terse, eloquent prose, Langston spares no detail as he transports readers inside, where he translates “jailspeak,” the vernacular of men in prison--both the inmates and the guards-- and exposes the profoundly troubling day-to-day reality of the prison industrial complex. Jailspeak is a heartbreaking, viscerally honest, timely, and critically important book. I've read many books on penology, prisons, and the criminal justice system (for my memoir, Body Leaping Backward), from the perspective of corrections officers, inmates, sociologists, activists, and scholars. JailSpeak is one of the most powerful, close-up looks inside a prison. It's an acutely truthful, intelligent and deeply moving narrative about life behind bars for prisoners and their keepers.