In the Spider’s Web is the second of three books concerned with my experience and the experiences of children I knew when I was a rehabilitation counselor in the institution I call Ash Meadow. The first book, the bulk of the journal I kept during my years there, was published under the title Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility. Readers of that book will have recognized several of the characters encountered in In the Spider’s Web.
Readers of this book who have not read Paranoia & Heartbreak may want to know more about Norah Joines whom I have mentioned in Spider’s Web; her life is treated more fully in the former book. Also, she is included in my personal essay, “Days with the Thugs,” in the essay collection, How I Learned That I Could Push the Button. She is not named in that essay, but is described as a “gang kid” and one of my favorites of the kids I had known in Ash Meadow.
My aim in these books has been to depict, as accurately as I can, incarcerated children not as living their lives apart from the mainstream of American society, but as an adjunct to it, perhaps even a necessary adjunct. Certainly the unhappiness in their lives is an American creation, in the same way that the contentment in other people’s lives is.