Imprisoned Minds: Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison
Authors: Erik S. Maloney, and Kevin A. Wright
Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2024. 210 pages.
Reviewer: Justin McDevitt | Spring 2025
From its searing and vulnerable prologue, Imprisoned Minds: Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison (2025) by Erik S. Maloney and Kevin A. Wright promises to be a unique and powerful voice in the landscape of criminology, and it more than delivers.
A collaboration between incarcerated scholar Mahoney and his professor and supporting author Wright, the book consists chiefly of narrative vignettes, each chapter belonging to a different speaker, grouped into three units according to the development of Mahoney’s chief concept, the “incarcerated mind.” Mahoney at the beginning and both authors at the end deftly tie together the threads in the narrative chapters to support the concept’s development.
From the outset, Maloney convincingly argues that the study of the issues impacting incarcerated people is often undertaken by people who, though well-meaning, are nevertheless unequipped to translate accurately or form a complete account of the data they are recording, expressly because they typically lack the attendant personal experience necessary to contextualize it well.
And the stakes, Maloney argues, are high. He must, he argues, “educate those who believe they have criminality all figured out” or no real progress can be made. The title itself implies that the solutions must come from inside the prison. This is both true at the system level and at the level of each person’s mentality, Maloney deftly convinces us. Prisons are prisons, wherever they may be.
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Accordingly, Maloney has capitalized on his undergraduate education in the social sciences earned while incarcerated, conducting long-form interviews with a range of characters he has met in prison. The trick, though, is that the “harm, pain, and anguish” recounted in the vignettes is not that encountered in prison, though the specter of that menace is never far in the background as the stories unfold. Instead, the experiences that shaped them in early life ultimately made prison more likely, thanks largely to the way it left their minds “imprisoned”.
Damage closes doors, and we need these stories at least as much as we need data to help us understand how. Or, as Wright adds, “Our book is about faces over numbers.”
Imprisoned Minds is, on its face, a qualitative account of how and why people ultimately find themselves in prison looking for a way out. It is no mere testimonial, however.
Like most qualitative offerings, it articulates a concept and then marshals impactful first-person accounts supporting it. At times, it seems also to self-consciously contend—a bit too humbly perhaps—that it should be seen as at least an equally valid contribution to the knowledge ecosystem as other books on the roots of incarceration. Maloney’s argument, understandably so, is that he belongs at the table.
But Imprisoned Minds is more. In my view, it is most powerfully understood as a corrective lens fitted onto the entire field of criminology. In other words, it is not so much a different form of knowledge-making as it is a necessary filter one must put on before conducting—or even consuming—the bulk of extant research in the field, especially quantitative. In this effort, Maloney asks us to put down whatever we’re reading or writing, read this book first, then go back and start again with fresh eyes.
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Of course, the book also makes an essential contribution to the literature in its own right. And Maloney is nothing if not clear-eyed in this pursuit of a new thread in the conversation: “I never thought I’d end up in prison. No one with an imprisoned mind ever does.” This earnest first-person voice signals that the book is both deeply personal and defiantly authoritative. Though Maloney politely asks for a seat at the table, he knows he belongs.
This concept of the “imprisoned mind” is developed throughout the book, less by traditional conceptual construction than by taking readers into a series of imprisoned minds and letting them witness the confinement. What makes this conceit most effective is, perhaps surprisingly, not the sense of chaos or lostness one might feel by being parachuted into someone else’s world, but the exact opposite.
The series of six carefully crafted narratives (and threads of an informal seventh from the author himself) reinforces to the reader that the stories leading to people arriving in prison often follow a startingly consistent—and consonant—logic. Maloney and Wright’s deeply humanizing treatment of otherwise gut-wrenching stories, and the crystalline first-person perspective through which each is told, mean that the stories don’t just grip us: they are us. We aren’t just swept along by them; we come to understand how those who lived them were swept along, too.
As Wright, Maloney’s professor and supporting author, confirms in his chapter near the end, “Many people in prison are there due to circumstances and to the decisions they made that were bound by those circumstances.” And Maloney himself is quick to add in the beginning that nothing written in the ensuing pages is meant to absolve anyone, himself included, of individual culpability for their actions. But the overarching effect is that, by the conclusion, you not only understand why the people telling the vignettes did what they did, you feel more than a little doubt that you would have acted much differently yourself.
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To be sure, Maloney’s technique of an incarcerated researcher interviewing his peers behind bars lends not just an air of credibility to the work, but of poignant subversiveness. As Wright notes, as only an observer without lived experience can, “The stories in this book matter. Reading this book gives you a more complex picture of the men behind the walls.”
The real-life cast of characters—Kidd, Sergeant, Oso, Dee, Oakland, and Unique—come alive through Maloney’s storytelling and Wright’s steady editing hand. As Wright points out, it is only through Maloney and the trust he has gained through being a peer to these authors behind bars that these accounts can even make it to the page. But the narratives are also very much the characters’ own, told through their eyes and with their unique constellations of hopes and devastations.
The first unit focuses on the development stage of the incarcerated mind. The first narrative is that of Kidd, whose largely hateful mother surprises him one day when he is nine with a homemade breakfast and rare words of tenderness. He arrives home from school later that day to find her body in the living room, a gun in her hand. Years later, the story of his incarceration begins with a hail of gunfire from a weapon of his own.
Sergeant’s narrative follows this by telling of how he grew up standing helplessly by as his father beat his mother, who would then pass the violence on to him. Despite many highs and lows occurring in the intervening years, he seems ultimately surprised to find that he has become both the best and worst versions of his parents, despite—and because of—how it has shaped him.
For fear of giving too much away, the remaining stories chart similar paths through the stages of progression and permanence of the imprisoned mind, allowing us to see what forces serve to entrench and prevent the escape from such a mind, despite the narrators’ own awareness of the potency of the damage they have absorbed.
The fact that the reader knows, by virtue of the stories being included in this book, that their tellers all ended up in prison only adds to the sense of inevitability that comes from damage causing damage. And yet, the stories read like the epitaphs in Edgar Lee Masters’ classic Spoon River Anthology, wistful and elegiac, not morose and perfunctory.
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From a systemic point of view, the authors don’t treat incarceration as much more than the ultimate manifestation—or even the logical conclusion—of the mental, psychological, and emotional traumas and barriers that led them there. As implied above, this isn’t a book about life in prison but about how life can easily lay the groundwork for ending up there.
But it’s also a story of hope and possibility. For all the “lessons [] born from ugliness” it necessarily recounts, the book expends the energy it does because it believes these stories can make a difference. The audience, again, isn’t people unfamiliar with the study of crime and incarceration, but those of us who believe ourselves experts. The stories can—even must—matter to us.
Thus, in a sense, the solution Maloney seeks now depends on us. What do we do now that we can see more clearly the contours of our own work as interpreters? As Wright notes near the end of the book, “Imprisonment of the body is the punishment. Ensuring the continued imprisonment of the mind is overpunishment.”
Whether we are primarily educators or researchers, we put this book down not only knowing how to fulfill our role more fully but knowing that we must.
Justin McDevitt is the Director of the Women’s College Partnership at Indiana Women’s Prison at Marian University.
