An incomplete picture of life behind bars

There are two stories here: One is about life at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Framingham, a century-old women’s prison outside Boston; the second is about how author Cristina Rathbone never got past the prison visiting room. It is impossible to talk about the former without taking into account the latter.

In “A World Apart,” Rathbone strikes a wonderful balance as a writer, bringing to life a handful of female inmates who agree to tell her their stories. She has a novelist’s ear for the telling moment, and a journalist’s ability to fold history into current events without letting the effort show.

The results are compelling: Any woman whose heart does not ache when she reads about a prisoner named Denise and her young son, Patrick, probably doesn’t have a heart, and I would defy any man with a soul to read about the sexual exploits of the male guards without feeling a deep and profound shame at what his gender is capable of. Rathbone paints a vivid picture of a world where a decent toothbrush is a luxury item, where a health-conscious woman studies her receding gums in a shard of a mirror, where sex with a guard -- and the favors it brings -- eventually seems preferable to a life of lonely deprivation.

Even the historical sections hold interest, since this material is presented with the same startled indignation that lends vibrancy to the rest of the tale. When Framingham opened more than 130 years ago, women were routinely arrested for homelessness, for sleeping with a married man, for being anything less than exemplary members of the middle class; then, as now, economics defined who got into trouble, or at least who got punished for it.

Ah, but then there’s the warning in the opening paragraph of the book’s prologue: “It’s important that you know this: except for the visiting room ... I have seen little of the prison I write about in this book,” Rathbone writes. “Despite nearly five years of research, two successful lawsuits and countless trips to court, the Massachusetts Department of Correction continues to deny me access.”

Anyone who has ever tried to write a book based on journalism, not history, knows that the process of gaining access can be the most difficult part, the path littered with rejections from people and institutions alike.

But those are the rules of the game, and Rathbone suffers greatly for not being able to get past the visiting room, even as she gains our admiration for continuing not to take no for an answer.

We only get inside through the stories the women tell, and that, in the end, is not the whole story. We may think we’d rather not know anything more about some of these guards, the ones who consider trading chewing gum for sex to be reasonable barter, and yet they determine what much of prison life will be like, and it’s impossible not to wonder how they too got to this place.

As oral history, “A World Apart” makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the increasing number of women behind bars. As a work of narrative nonfiction, it is sadly lacking, because Rathbone never did get to see what she needed to make the picture complete.

Reviewers can get sidetracked discussing the book they think an author should have written, which is unfair to the work and to its writer. But in this case, there is another book, the one Rathbone herself wanted to write, and given her commitment and energy, it’s a shame she didn’t get the chance. No matter how sympathetic we may be to the plight of some of these women, we need to hear the other voices in the room -- the author needs to be in that room, bearing witness -- if we are truly to understand what’s going on behind the prison walls.

Karen Stabiner is the author of “My Girl: Adventures With a Teen in Training.”