Customer Reviews

Improvised Weapons in American Prisons

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I came at this book from a design point of view. I have a theory about design, that really innovative work happens when people have limited, rather than expanded, access to tools and materials. Thus, for really interesting design solutions, we should look to people who are deprived of all the advanced industrial processes and high-tech materials that we enjoy in polite society in the first world. Prison populations are a good example.

The photos in this book provide a pretty interesting set of examples of improvised weapons, including a wide variety of knives, a zip gun or two, and some garottes. The 12-gauge zip gun, I thought, was the most interesting item. Also included was an amazing picture of a noose an inmate had braided from torn strips of bedsheet, for the purpose of hanging himself. The text does not mention whether or not it was successfully used.

Unfortunately, while the photographs are interesting, there aren't really enough of them to make a book by themselves, and so some somewhat perfunctory chapters of text have been added explaining in rather vague terms what prison life is like and why weapons are important. These are things that seem pretty obvious to me. One of the first chapters begins with the sentence, "Understandably, prison is not pleasant." That kind of dazzling glimpse of the obvious characterizes most of the text; if you want a book about what it's like to be in prison, I would recommend Jim Hogshire's "You Are Going to Prison," which provides a lot more information and practical advice than this text. I wish that it had included more information about the sources of materials for the weapons illustrated in the book, and the processes used to produce, conceal, and use them. I would like to have seen a kind of "Improvised Weapons Manual for Prisoners," and not just a collection of photographs padded with vague and poorly-supported anecdotes about prison life. Almost all of the footnotes to the text attribute the author's information to "personal conversation with prison staff," or other unverifiable, or at least statistically insignificant, sources.

Where do these various chunks of metal fashioned into knives come from, within the prison? How are they formed? What about the zip guns? How does one fashion a rope (or a noose) by braiding bedsheets together? This kind of how-to information was almost totally absent from the text.

Great book, very informative , this book goes into
amazing detail on the ability of men to fashion weapons
in the most unlikly of places(i.e. american prisons) , the weapons range from the very crude to the very sophisticated
and clear photo's of the weapons are presented.