A look at the struggle of life after prison

Such, Gonnerman writes, was the lot of Elaine Bartlett.

Bartlett was 26, a self-employed hairdresser, and the mother of four young children when she was arrested in a sting for selling cocaine to a police informant, convicted under New York's punitive drug laws, and served 16 years in New York State's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.

Gonnerman, who grew up in Sudbury, is a staff writer for The Village Voice, for which she has reported extensively on the criminal justice system. "Life on the Outside," a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction, grew out of stories recounting Bartlett's struggles following her release from prison and return to her extended family's apartment in a housing project on New York's Lower East Side.

Gonnerman reports the events that led up to Bartlett's arrest and incarceration, but the core of the book is the struggle to rebuild her life, the frustrations of parole, and her role as an anti-drug-law activist.

Bartlett appears more fortunate than many former prisoners; she was able to obtain a full-time job as as an aide in a residential drug-treatment program within six months of her release. For the men there, Gonnerman writes, Bartlett "was a role model -- a real-life example of someone who had made it, who had lifted herself up from the bottom of society and found her place in the workforce."

In her own life, however, she was trying to make up for lost time, looking for a boyfriend to replace the man she had been arrested with, who was still in prison. With the coming of warm weather, Gonnerman writes, Bartlett "had been conducting an experiment of sorts, trying to figure out how much sex appeal she still possessed." Finding boyfriends "had been easy" at 26, "but what about at 42?"

She was also spending too freely, buying clothes, furnishings, and gifts for her family. "You'll get all caught up in trying to please people," another former prisoner told her.