First, I must start this book review with full disclosure. I know Emile DeWeaver. We both worked at the prisoner-run San Quentin News. We were also participants in a weekly creative writing workshop.

Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine is Emile DeWeaver’s exposition on the history of Black people in America, from the prism of prison. He uses his lived experience, which includes his own incarceration, to pen his words.

No surprise, imprisonment and its collateral consequences are central themes in Ghost, peppered with the indispensable realities of red-white-and-blue racism to complement DeWeaver’s storytelling. He makes it clear how the tacit fallout from America’s original sin — slavery — and how White supremacy is the root of its evil, of which Blacks are the unconcealed recipients.

“[I] call rehabilitation in prison a White supremacist project — it normalizes false narratives such as personal accountability that seek to justify racism,” DeWeaver writes. For him, rehabilitation was a condition on which his freedom hinged. “I had to appear to be grateful for rehabilitation, the path laid out by prison officials for any redemption.”

Ghost is a revolutionary expression of what many malcontent prisoners, entangled in various gears of the Machine, such as the parole board, must undergo.

Readers unfamiliar with prison may consider Ghost an undeserved diatribe about California’s parole process, but DeWeaver fittingly supports his assertion, writing, “The parole board, in fact, requires incarcerated people to ‘admit’ that the legal system that imprisons them is fair… The parole board would never have released me if I openly disrupted the political and social power structures on which parole commissioners’ authority rests.

Admitting — or surrendering — to a state narrative as a condition to gain one’s freedom is a point well-taken by many serving indeterminate sentences in California. As such, DeWeaver underscores that reality in myriad anecdotes that few legal scholars may be capable of voicing, simply because they lack personal experience with imprisonment and parole. But for those serving life sentences, he is preaching to the proverbial choir.

“The validation of parole commissioners’ preconceptions also means the perpetuation of White supremacist culture,” DeWeaver writes. “The pathway out of prison, then, is to dedicate your life, through prison programs and redemption narratives, to validating and perpetuating White supremacy. I did this… What I learned was self-abnegation.”

What Ghost consistently echoes are realities unknown to many who are public safety officials. “Rehabilitation” is the state’s panacea for crime and other social ills, but DeWeaver, who is Black, aptly identifies it as “the near enemy of personal transformation.” In the end, he admits “I had to become a White supremacist to get out of prison.”

Some of the writing in Ghost passed off as truth is rooted in DeWeaver’s personal experience. For example, “My governor would never have commuted the life sentence of a person who challenged the social narratives and strategies of corrections. I had to act out a script in which I alone held responsibility for my incarceration…”

What I found offbeat in Ghost is how DeWeaver suggests he single-handedly freed himself, through his writing, while concealing his advocacy work to challenge the system. This narrative conflicts with the support network that had helped him. These were people who worked for organizations inside San Quentin such as Mt. Tamalpais College (formerly Patten University), William James Association’s creative writing, and community-based organizations such as the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, all seemingly overlooked.

Without question, DeWeaver is a brilliant writer and thinker, but no man walks alone in prison. He polished his skills through many rehabilitative prison programs. Call them self-help, rehabilitation, or personal transformation. That’s how he achieved his freedom.

I was incarcerated before DeWeaver, who is 17 years my junior. I am now closing in on 29 years of confinement. There is a wisdom that comes with age, and time inside. In large part, it is the realization that prisoners fight a protracted war of attrition. That is a unique battle for each person.

“[San Quentin News] perpetuated certain structural harms,” DeWeaver writes about his time at the inmate-run publication. “[W]e wanted the world to believe that incarceration could be a benevolent experience wherein incarcerated people could listen to the rehabilitative wisdom of the state, fix themselves, and come back to society as productive citizens.”

“My peers [at San Quentin News] and I were ‘special’ because we were articulate, emotionally intelligent, accountable, remorseful; we contributed value to our prison community and to the communities we’d harmed before our arrests,” DeWeaver writes.

Again, DeWeaver’s truth. I worked at San Quentin News before he arrived. I am there now. The newspaper’s focus — past and present — has been to report on incarceration, rehabilitation, and reentry. As I recall, he had other ambitions that did not align with staff. Abolition was never the mission of the newspaper.

Overall, I recommend prisoners read Ghost before the prison system deems it contraband. It is a counter-narrative about prison, rehabilitation and parole, and few can appreciate DeWeaver’s prose unless they have lived inside the prison industrial complex, or have been one of its victims.