From her first taste of heroin, the next nine years would be a blur-living on the streets, digging for a vein, selling drugs and sex, plunging off a bridge when it all became too much, all while trying to hold herself together enough to finish her degree at Cornell. With all the intensity she saved for the ice, she dove into self-destruction. But when her skating partnership ended abruptly, her world shattered. It’s a searing condemnation of our cruel and unjust project of caging human beings, a firsthand account of what this entails and a challenge not to look away from America’s flawed and punitive carceral system.An electric and unforgettable memoir about a young woman's journey-from the ice rink, to addiction and a prison sentence, to the newsroom-emerging with a fierce determination to expose the broken system she experienced.Īn elite, competitive figure skater growing up, Keri Blakinger poured herself into the sport, even competing at nationals.

It’s this rare combination of personal narrative and reporting that makes Corrections in Ink such a singular reading experience.īlakinger’s raw and important memoir isn’t only a drug recovery and success story. To hold on to her humanity, Blakinger had to find joy in unexpected places.Ĭorrections in Ink is written with deep insight and urgency, and Blakinger’s gripping insider knowledge and experience is supported by research, strong analysis and a blistering indictment of the criminal justice system. It is a sad and powerless position for anyone to be in, as the prison system is designed to slowly strip away one’s humanity. She also acknowledges that, as a white woman, she was in a position of privilege and that Black and brown people are treated far worse, get tougher sentences and have worse outcomes than their white counterparts. She got clean during the almost two years she was imprisoned, but afterward she still had to grapple with the inhumanity of being behind bars.īlakinger details the cruelties, big and small, that she endured while she was incarcerated. In her exceptional debut, Corrections in Ink, investigative journalist Blakinger reflects on an important decade of her life that took her from figure skating to drug addiction, to selling drugs and sex, to an arrest on a drug charge while she was a college student at Cornell University. But when that pursuit ended in disappointment, Blakinger’s life came undone.

Her childhood was filled with loving parental support, academic success and a fierce pursuit of competitive figure skating that took her all the way to nationals. As the daughter of a successful lawyer and a schoolteacher, her upper-middle-class suburban existence seemed, from the outside, perfect. By most measures, Keri Blakinger lived a charmed life.

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