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What it argues
Writing My Wrongs is Shaka Senghor's account of his journey from a childhood marked by abuse and neglect in Detroit, through a murder conviction and nineteen years in Michigan prisons — seven of them in solitary confinement — to his emergence as a writer, activist, and advocate for criminal justice reform. It is a memoir of accountability as much as survival.
Senghor does not write from the position of innocence. He killed a man at nineteen during a drug deal gone wrong, and he holds that fact clearly throughout the book without hiding behind circumstance. What the memoir traces instead is the internal transformation that made it possible for him to move from that act toward responsibility, empathy, and purpose. Reading and writing are the engines of that transformation. In solitary, Senghor read voraciously — Malcolm X, James Baldwin, African history — and eventually started writing, producing journals that became the raw material for this book. The act of writing forced him to examine his choices with the kind of honest attention that passive reading alone cannot generate.
What it gets right
- 1.
Accountability and victimhood are not mutually exclusive. Senghor was shaped by trauma and still responsible for the harm he caused. The memoir holds both simultaneously.
- 2.
Solitary confinement inflicts psychological damage that makes rehabilitation harder, not easier. The conditions that are supposed to punish also prevent growth.
- 3.
Literacy — in the deepest sense, learning to read one's own life through books and writing — is a form of transformation that prisons often cannot completely suppress.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Shaka Senghor is an American author and criminal justice reform advocate. He served nineteen years in Michigan prisons before his release in 2010. Since then he has spoken at TED, worked with the Echoing Green and Soros Justice Fellowship programs, and advised on criminal justice policy at multiple levels. Writing My Wrongs is his first book. He has been a fellow at the MIT Media Lab and teaches and speaks widely on reform, trauma, and transformation.
