Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison Themes

Transformation is pretty much the name of the game in Writing My Wrongs. The whole book is about how Shaka started out as one person…and became a much different one. There are lots of things that...

What does it mean to be just? Is justice about how a whole system works, or about how an individual lives? Or something in between? In Writing My Wrongs, Shaka gives us an up close view of the Amer...

Writing My Wrongs is a prison memoir, so it's no shocker that freedom and confinement is a major theme. But it's brutally eye-opening what the system of confinement often does to people—many seem...

Most people agree that violence is a problem. But in Writing My Wrongs, it's not a problem that's just standing on its own. It's wrapped up with other social problems, including personal and instit...

Shaka experiences a lot of racism throughout Writing My Wrongs, and he also has to do a lot of learning to figure out what he thinks about race in America. Some of his problems stem from obvious di...

Family is a super important theme in Writing My Wrongs, with a lot of layers to it. On the one hand, Shaka's family is a solid presence in his life, and his dad is an amazing role model who is alwa...

Spirituality isn't just about what happens in your inner life—it's also about what happens in your connections to other people, the cultures that shape your experience of religion, and the long h...

The book is called Writing My Wrongs—you'd better believe writing and literature is an important theme. Literature and writing have a crucial role to play in turning Shaka's life around. Reading...