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It’s probably pretty safe to assume that the sort of prisons shown on TV, and their portrayals of life inside, bear as much resemblance to real jails as the doctors in Grey’s Anatomy or House do to their NHS counterparts. That’s why Frankie has written this book: to provide a guide to what life inside is really like and how best to survive it with your sanity, and body, intact.
The first thing you notice about the ''Little Book of Prison'' is that it is indeed a ''little'' book, more of a pocket sized booklet than a typical tome, both in dimensions and number of pages. Inside it’s a little different too and one of my pet peeves is realized as exclamation points are used like they’re going out of style!!!!!! It’s bad enough when this happens online in blogs but in a book it’s really annoying!!!! As is the absence of a couple of apostrophes (one on the back cover, no less)!!!!! Frankie goes out of his way to tell us that he is an educated man with a senior job, a Masters degree and aspirations of doing a (now publicly-funded) PhD (though alas his sentence isn’t long enough to facilitate this) but it’s not really the impression you get while reading this book. Perhaps it’s down to the editing, perhaps he’s written it more to his target audience (with x % a considerable percentage of the prison population lacking even basic literacy skills) than to the rest of us, but it comes across as almost childish in places, like a school leaver’s attempt at book writing rather than the real thing.
Style and presentation aside, if we look purely at the content it’s actually quite a readable book. Frankie is not a first time offender, but this is his first spell inside and he starts writing the LBP during his baptism of fire, to help prevent others going through what he’s had to endure. Hot tips are backed up with anecdotes that help flesh out the image of life behind bars, and from how to get more money to how to get more gym time, what to do with your socks at night, and why letter writing is a lost art it covers a lot of ground. It’s entertaining and easy to plough through – think hours, not days – and while it didn’t elicit much sympathy in me, it also didn’t leave me brimming with disdain of him and his compatriots.