Prisoners' Inventions

By Joel Score and Temporary Services

Book Overview

Imagine that your house spans six by nine feet, your mattress is just two inches thick, you are known to your neighbors by an identification number, and items most consider crucial to everyday existence are outlawed. How do inmates in prisons like this throughout the United States make such lives bearable?
In 2001, the artists' collective Temporary Services asked an incarcerated artist named Angelo to share with them the ways in which inmates adapt to their confinement. Angelo responded with over one hundred pages of meticulously detailed ink drawings and text. The resulting compilation, Prisoners' Inventions, is a unique guide to prison life, covering subjects ranging from how to cook a grilled cheese sandwich in a locker to how to chill a soda using a toilet. Many of the documented items--such as cigarette lighters, condoms, even alarm clocks--are considered contraband, and Angelo includes anecdotes describing their creation and use.
Already featured in Playboy, Harper's, Le Monde, and on This American Life, Prisoners' Inventions provides powerful testimony to life on the inside as it is endured by over two million individuals in the United States alone.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0945323026
• ISBN13: 9780945323020
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Whitewalls
• Length: 119 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.3" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Inspiring

This book is an inspiring testament to the human spirit. It's especially interesting for anyone with an engineering mind or a knack for making things. We are all inventors at heart!

Excellent and Insightful Text

If you have any interest in multiple intelligences, ingenuity, prison culture, or even just crafts I can't recommend this book enough. If you work in any type of detention facility this should be required reading!

Totally awesome book, fascinating!

This is a great book for anyone interested in off things. I pick it up occasionally and am always fascinated.

Facinating insight to improvising "on the inside"

When all you have isn't much, and much of what you could use is contraband, you learn to make do. "Angelo", the author/illustrator of this work, is a prisoner who has explained and illustrated various ways that prisoners make do with what little they can get ahold of in ways that would make MacGyver proud. Making chess pieces, drinking cups and dice out of paper mache (toilet paper and sugar); a cigarette lighter out of tape, wire and two D-Cells; cooking using toilet paper as fuel; turning an old hot sauce bottle into a showerhead; converting empty butane lighters and lip balm tubes into salt and pepper shakers; recycling glue from pastry boxes, various ways of using immersion heaters, or building your own out of paper clips, rubber bands, metal tabs from a notebook binder and a toothbrush, etc. A fascinating look at how people can improvise in some of the most dire of circumstances.

Not Just For Inmates!

Totally entertaining - everyone's getting this for Christmas from me this year. Yes, the drawings are nifty, but the text about prison life which necessitates such inventions was more fascinating, to me anyway. Although weapons and drugs are not covered, it's still worth every penny.