Corrections_Today_Fall_2025_Vol.87_No.3

COMMUNICATIONS & PUBLICATIONS

T he American Correctional Association is pleased to offer book reviews. For more information or to become a book reviewer, contact Kirk Raymond at (703) 224-0193 or kraymond@aca.org. Bookshelf

while working at the Luther Luckett Correctional Institution, which he probably brought with him from serving twenty years in the Army. In writing the introduction to the first book, Doing Time Eight Hours a Day, he says the book was written for many reasons, not the least being a curiosity of what happened inside the prison. He continued to say that going into corrections fulfilled his need to let the public know what happened behind the concertina-wired fences, locked doors and drably painted walls. He indicates he writes about the stories of officers and inmates on their daily journeys of tribula tions. He continues to reveal how friendships are formed among the opposite sides (staff and inmates) and how they impacted each other’s lives. One of the things that struck me the most is that you get to know the inmates serving years inside the institu tion, and they get to know you. Comments are not sugar-coated regarding some incident, nor are

Doing Time Eight Hours a Day: Memoirs of a Correctional Officer By James R. Palmer, iUniverse, 2013, 109 pp.

More Tales from the Yard: Memoirs of a Correctional Officer By James R. Palmer, iUniverse, 2024, 119 pp.

which would be excellent reading for anyone considering working in corrections. Both books had information any “hack” will remem ber from their first day, but more importantly, the guidance they provide. What I enjoyed most when reading these two books is that they were not all gloom and doom, as you see in many books about jails and prisons; a good amount of humor was found when read ing. This humor was not gallows humor, but humor the author found in the day-to-day work he had

REVIEWED BY: Art Beeler, Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law and Adjunct Professor at North Carolina Central University

R ecently, I received a pack age of two small books authored by James R. Palmer in 2013 and 2024. I was pleasantly surprised. Although written ten years apart, these two small books had many gems,

they horrified into something they were not; the remarks of the staff and the incarcerated individual spoke to what happened.

Corrections Today | Fall 2025

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