You Got Nothing Coming - Tapa blanda

The staggering memoir of a middle-class, middle-aged man who fell into the inferno of the American prison system, and what he had to do to survive.

You are convicts. Your job here is to lie, cheat, steal, extort, get tattoos, take drugs, sell drugs, shank and sock each other. Just don't let us catch you - that's our job. We catch you, you got nothin' coming. It is your worst nightmare. You wake up naked in an eight-by-ten-foot steel cell designated "Suicide Watch #3". The cell is real. Jimmy Lerner, former family man and corporate strategic planner, has become a prison "fish", or green new arrival. Taken to a penitentiary in the Nevada desert to serve a 12-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter, this previously nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn ends up sharing a claustrophobic cell with Kansas, a hugely muscled skinhead with a swastika tattooed on his neck and a serious set of issues. "You Got Nothing Coming" takes us into a corrupt world powered by violence, drugs, rape, fear and racial hatred. With brash, dark humour Jimmy Lerner tells us how the techniques learnt in management seminars have helped him survive in this hostile environment, and how a lethal act of self-defence landed him in this circle of American prison hell in the first place. Bracingly cynical and perceptive, this scarifying story is all truth.