Letter from the Publisher

Last year I happened to be leafing through an East Village literary journal called Topic when I came across the opening sentence of what was described as a work-in-progress by an inmate at a maximum-security facility in Lancaster, California: “When I was nineteen, I killed a man in a drunken, drugged-up fistfight.”

We can all recite at least a few first sentences from the classics of world literature: “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” “Happy families are all alike…” This sentence was as memorable to me as Jane Austen’s or Tolstoy’s; I knew instantly that it would stay with me forever. It wouldn’t be adequate to say that it kept me reading; it kept me thinking about what I’d read until, a few weeks later, still haunted by its finality (no going back from there), I decided to get in touch with the author.

It wasn’t hard. The contact information was in his contributor’s note:

Kenneth E. Hartman, C-19449
CSP-LAC/A2-217L
P.O. Box 4430
Lancaster, CA 93539-4430

I wrote Ken one of those letters that writers get from editors: Are you working on anything? Is this part of a longer work-in-progress? A few weeks later, I got a typed letter in reply. Yes, he was working on a book—a memoir about his life in prison, where he had spent the last 29 years. I asked to see it and, again after a few weeks, a manuscript of some forty pages arrived in the mail. I sat down and read them at once, in a single sitting. The writer’s mandate was clear: “I set out to write of my life, how I came to be who I am, how I put myself into prison, and how I developed a voice that people have listened to from out of this darkness.”

Ken Hartman has now written the book he promised himself he would write. It’s called Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars, and I believe it’s the best American prison memoir ever published. Just to be sure, I read over Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast—not even close. There’s no hectoring here—just the truth, written in a prose that possesses the authenticity, the voice, of great literature.

I’ve gotten to know Ken in the course of editing this book, both through an extensive correspondence and through two visits I made to the maximum-security facility where he is serving out his sentence as an LWOP (life without parole). He’s a thoughtful, engaging, gentle person who is trying to change the prison system through the Honor Yard program, which encourages motivated prisoners to change their lives by transferring to a yard where they pledge to remain drug-free and renounce membership in gangs.

Instituted in 2004, the program produced immediate results. Violent crime rates fell; drugs virtually disappeared; a high percentage of inmates who had joined the Yard enrolled in work/study programs. In a way, it was too successful: under pressure from guards’ unions and victims’ rights organizations, Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed further funds, and now, after a riot at a prison in Chino, the whole California system is under scrutiny; a panel of Federal judges has ordered the state to reduce the prison population by 43,000 within two years.

Ken remains undiscouraged and focused on change. He still ends his letters, “Take the best of care and strive to be happy. Peace.”