Love Lockdown · The Bush Boys
Plus Reelz, Tamron Hall, and the January poll
the true crime that's worth your time
Greetings, readers new and old! We’d had it in mind to take the week off, but since Best Evidence got a sweet “featured” spot on the Substack homepage, we thought we’d sneak a little surprise mini-edition in before year’s end.
And of course I’ll have my Captive review in by Friday, but that’s only for paid subscribers, so if you want access to that and all the other paywalled recs, you know what to do!
But anyone can join our true-crime resolutions discussion, and we hope you will. Friends don’t let friends read Patricia Cornwell… — SDB
The crime
Not that author Elizabeth Greenwood doesn’t make a number of tart observations about the cruel and unusual baseline of the American carceral experience, but for the most part, the crimes that put the subjects of Love Lockdown: Dating, Sex, and Marriage in America’s Prisons behind bars are incidental to Greenwood’s longitudinal study of how intimate partnerships form, sustain, and break apart when (at least) one partner is in prison.
The story
…Do we have a word for the Mary Roach “class” of investigative non-fiction? “Immersive survey”? “Gimmickoir”? …Okay, that’s unfair; I didn’t love Stiff, but it’s mostly the titling conventions in her body of work, which I doubt Roach had final say on, that I find shticky, plus Roach’s stuff is generally filed under “popular science/humor,” and Love Lockdown is not that. But Greenwood’s previous book, Playing Dead, suggests that she’s sharing bookshelf space with Roach and AJ Jacobs: grabby, sometimes even stunty title/ledes reported with a wealth of subjective/personal detail that itself is part of how the book gets pitched.
That sounds dismissive; it isn’t intended that way, and again, I would say that Greenwood’s work is less centered at its inception on the author’s “journey.” But that aspect is definitely present in Love Lockdown — sidebars about Greenwood’s ambivalence towards one relationship given the specific charges against the incarcerated half of the pair; a detailed account of Greenwood’s breathless visiting-day quest for a pair of sweatpants “modest” enough to pass CO muster — and how much you enjoy Love Lockdown will depend on how much meta paralleling you think works in long-run journalism like this. It succeeds, for me; it’s not entirely necessary to the reporting, but it’s also not self-indulgent. Part of what Greenwood is trying to do is to acknowledge and then shift assumptions about “MWI” (“met while incarcerated”) relationships in their various incarnations and stages, from how these couples form to what the spouse on the outside “gets out of” the relationship emotionally to what role PTSD plays in re-integration…if that last thing is even something to reasonably plan for. Greenwood’s own logistical and emotional experiences with the penal system and with family-building while trying to research Love Lockdown do provide context that’s relevant to the larger task of nuancing these relationships.
Even if you don’t need that dimensionalizing, it’s easy enough to skim, and there’s no shortage of solid intel, about everything from the hierarchies of prison wives’ groups to what kind of foundation garments will set off a prison’s metal detectors (or guards’ Spidey senses) to The Police Gazette’s templating of the modern tabloid-coverage “model of following crime”…in 1845. Greenwood provides any number of Wikiholes to disappear down while you read; sometimes Greenwood’s noting of her own research biases, and quoting of statistics about the racial inequalities infecting every aspect of the carceral/justice complex, feel somewhat awkward, but it’s awkward territory she’s in, and overall the prose is laudably…quiet. She’s got everything on her plate from wrongful convictions to conjugal visits in Love Lockdown, and it can get sweaty fast in those rooms, but Greenwood keeps it frosty.
I don’t think you need to buy the book, but if your library has it, grab it, especially if you, like me, think Love After Lockup has a lot to tell us about compassion and the power of trust. — SDB
Time to choose the first bonus review of the new year! A handful of docudramae, a young CBC filmmaker gets personal, and a mysterious death in County Sligo — vote for as many as look interesting, and I’ll review what you pick!
As always, anyone can vote, but only paid subscribers get the review itself, so if you’re curious and you’ve got a fiver… — SDB
Reelz dropped their January 2022 premiere slate last week. Cases include Ethan “Affluenza Teen” Couch; Scott Peterson; the Chicago Mob; and “The Original 'COPS' Documentary Real Life Series Showing the Stories of Law Enforcement in the Line of Duty Across America.”
In other premiere news,
The Chameleon podcast’s “Wild Boys” season drops January 25. The con-centric (…sorry) pod’s latest story is about “the summer of 2003 when two half-starved young men turned up in a small Canadian town telling an incredible story. They’d been raised in the British Columbia wilderness, and this was their first-ever contact with society — they’d never seen a TV, gone to school, or registered for IDs. So the community took them in and set about introducing them to the modern world. Before long, the international media descended on the town, enthralled by the mysterious ‘Bush Boys.’ There was just one problem: not a word the boys said was true.”
And Someone They Knew… With Tamron Hall, originally slated for a January 9 drop, will now premiere March 6 on Court TV. — SDB
Next year on Best Evidence: Book reviews, bad guys, BET-CRPs, and all the true crime that’s worth your lang syne. Stay safe out there, you lot.
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