My Life in Prison by John Kiriamiti

About John Kiriamiti

My Life in Prison by John Kiriamiti

Drawing directly on his own experience of incarceration, Kiriamiti delivers in My Life in Prison one of the most honest accounts of the Kenyan prison system ever written. The book describes the violence, corruption, overcrowding, and dehumanisation of prison life, as well as the unexpected communities and hierarchies that form among inmates. Kiriamiti does not sensationalise or dramatise — his tone is matter-of-fact, which makes the horror all the more effective. But the book is also about resilience and transformation: how time in prison can become, paradoxically, a space for self-reflection and the beginning of change. It is an important document of a world that society prefers not to see, told with unflinching honesty by someone who has lived it.