Jake Abbott's In The Belly Of The Beast

In the book In The Belly of The Beast it talks from the point of view of Jack Abbott, and his experience in prison from a young age as he grows and becomes a man. The book was very well written and made it an enjoyable and easy read. There was a lot of information in this book about the behind scenes of prison and goes into great detail of that.

Reasons as to why the book was very enjoyable was that Jake Abbott did not spare any details or did not sugar coat his experience. He was point blank and made sure to get his point across. The amount of details made it feel as if you were right there watching it happen, especially when he was describing all of the time that he had to spend in the starvation cell. That part of the book had to resonate

Jake seemed to also push the buttons of the guards, one instance when he said that he had been waiting to splash water in the guards face for a while. Then after being given another thirty days on the starvation diet, when they gave him the paper to sign about it he wadded it into a ball and threw it at the officers’ chest, giving him yet another thirty days (In the belly of the beast). It seems that he is very reckless in the way that he goes about serving his time. He also mentioned that being yelled at or being spat at in the face once or twice is fine, but doing that everyday for thousands of days, no one can say that it is nothing and forget about it. He said the same about his stuff, that they can take something and he will learn to live without it, but take something everyday until they are reaching for his eyes, heart, soul, etc., is something that he can not deal with (In the belly of the beast). I think that this is where his anger comes from. One of the problems with corruption in penitentiaries was that if a guard disliked an inmate, that inmate had no say weather the guard is telling the truth or not. Especially if they had an aggressive background like Jake Abbott, he talked about how when he got transferred once that not one day after he got there one of the guards said the he assaulted him, even if