2015, Simon & Schuster, NY, 304

This book is written in three distinct parts, The Other Side of The Bars, How It Happened, and Reform.

The author is a former New Your City Police Commissioner, and all around toxic political animal of the law enforcement variety. He is not a likable guy, and I could care less how the machine he served, and still believes in, chewed him up and spit him out. So I skipped Part II. Part III is a well reasoned essay on how to fix the unfixable, by a person who believes we can have a just and humane tyranny for the greater good.

Overall the book is impeccably written, and if he did not use a ghost writer Kerik deserves some applause for his literary skills.

Part 1: The Other Side of The Bars, is simply excellent. This is like reading about a mugging from the point of view of a mugging victim who was also an MMA coach and understood what was behind his misery and violation. The way the federal prison system works is more chilling the more Bernard explains it. And, if you do not believe in the greater patriotic goodness as tyranny as expressed by him than his documentation of the grinding and warping of souls by the gizzard stones of the system that feeds upon us all is deafeningly stark.

From Jailer to Jailed is a must read for anyone who does, or does not, believe in our prison based society.

A very interesting segment was Kerik’s work as a fat, cussing—but concerned—corrections consultant for the King of Jordan.

The most eye-opening account is his description of being imprisoned with dozens of Iraq and Afghan war vets, who are now caught up in the penal system that undergirds our nation for simply trying to treat their war-induced insanity with those drugs that happen not to be sanctioned by our slave masters. I knew about the problem of homeless veterans, but not the incarcerated veterans that Bernard Kerik brings to light like so many lost ghosts.

Overall, I get the impression that going from jailer to jailed saved this man’s soul.