Where does that leave the violent offender and his family? They make up 50% of state prisoners in our country. Conservatives gleefully talk about it to create fear and grab votes. Over time, I've come to understand why I felt compelled to write and seen that so much of the way we talk about criminal justice is about how we avoid talking about 'the violent offender.' Progressives avoid it because it's uncomfortable. You don't know the point of having these disjointed thoughts. I think sometimes when you're in the middle of the writing you're not sure why sentences form in your head, early in the morning or late at night. Where did you want to shed light with this book? Where do we begin? You touch on so many points that seem urgent in our national conversation: education, race, incarceration, immigrant integration, plea bargains, failure of systems, and the promise that comes from reading great literature. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, MLK, and Frederick Douglass before she went to the Delta, and before Patrick was convicted of manslaughter under a plea bargain. What's amazing to me in this story is how Kuo, the child of immigrants, had found role models for her own experience in America in the work of W.E.B. She gathers up the classics and a reading list that would make most book lovers sigh, and tutors him each and every day for close to a year. Kuo takes an abrupt turn, and heads back to the Delta to see him, and once there, she decides to stay.
Upon her completion of Harvard Law, Kuo is unpacking in an apartment for her new job in California when she discovers Patrick Browning is in jail for murder. She spent two years in the Delta classroom before returning to Harvard, this time to Harvard Law School, a decision that did not come easily as she weighed her work with the students at Stars against the pressure from her Taiwanese immigrant parents.
Kuo first met Browning when she went to the Delta with Teach For America at a school for black kids who were struggling called Stars. Michelle Kuo’s debut memoir, Reading With Patrick, is a deep look into the disadvantage of black youth in the rural South from the perspective of an urban, Harvard-educated teacher and the humanity she discovers with her student from the Mississippi Delta named Patrick Browning who lands in prison. It reminded him of fellow inmates at his jail. But this picture of African American men thinking that they didn't deserve freedom, it felt very real to Patrick.
Author of Reading with Patrick Professor, The History, Law and Society Program The American University in Paris We think of slavery as being so distant an institution in that we recognize the systemic effects of it, but we still think that it's an institution that no longer exists.
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