You Got Nothing Coming - Couverture souple

You are convicts. Your job here is to lie, cheat, steal, extort, get tattoos, take drugs, sell drugs, shank and sock each other. Just don't let us catch you - that's our job. We catch you, you got nothin' coming.

It is your worst nightmare. You wake up naked in an eight-by-ten-foot steel cell designated 'Suicide Watch #3'. The cell is real. Jimmy Lerner, former family man and corporate strategic planner, has become a prison 'fish', or green new arrival. Taken to a penitentiary in the Nevada desert to serve a twelve-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter, this previously nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn ends up sharing a claustrophobic cell with Kansas, a hugely muscled skinhead with a swastika tattooed on his neck and a serious set of issues.

You Got Nothing Coming takes us into a corrupt world powered by violence, drugs, rape, fear and racial hatred. With brash, dark humour Jimmy Lerner tells us how the techniques learnt in management seminars have helped him survive in this hostile environment, and how a lethal act of self-defence landed him in this circle of American prison hell in the first place. Bracingly cynical and perceptive, this terrifying story is all truth.

"Lerner's white-collar Everyman perspective may force readers to truly see the cruel inequities of our current system . . . hard to put down, even harder to forget." (Kirkus Reviews)

"A magnetic memoir and a compelling addition to the contemporary reporting of life in the American penal system and one man's place in it." (Waterstones Books Quarterly)

"A considerable achievement . . . Forthrightly pulls back the curtain on a brutal system of punitive penal warehousing." (The Washington Post)

"A grim and vivid account of life inside the unnamed dehumanising Nevada jail which was Lerner's home between 1998 and 2002, and the events leading up to his imprisonment there . . . A Hardyesque tale of spiralling inevitability towards disaster . . . The mix of characters is extraordinarily rich." (Observer)

"He tells his tale, leading up to why he committed murder in the first place, with extraordinary humour, a raw tension and an ear for dialogue straight from God." (Independent 2005-04-24)