Love Lockdown by Elizabeth Greenwood

Love Lockdown

by Elizabeth Greenwood

This evocative and gripping investigative look into romantic relationships between incarcerated people and their spouses on the outside “is impossible to put down” (The Globe and Mail, Toronto).

What is it like to fall in love with someone in prison?

Over the course of five years, Elizabeth Greenwood followed the ups and downs of five couples who met during incarceration. In Love Lockdown, she pulls back the curtain on the lives of the husbands and wives supporting some of the 2.3 million people in prisons around the United States. In the vein of Modern Love, this book shines a light on how these relationships reflect the desire and delusion we all experience in our romantic pairings.

Love Lockdown infiltrates spaces many of us have only heard whispers of—from conjugal visits to prison weddings to relationships between the incarcerated themselves. “A tour de force of empathetic nonfiction storytelling” (Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of Blurred Lines), Love Lockdown changes the way you look at the American prison system and perhaps relationships in general.

Also published as Love in the Time of Incarceration.

Reviewed by Jeff Sexton on

4 of 5 stars

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Making The Case For A More Systematic Examination Of Its Topic. This book does a *tremendous* job in looking at as many facets of love and relationships involving the United States' millions - literally -of prisoners via multi-year case studies of five particular couples. And therein also lies its chief weakness - while the original research for the case studies themselves was conducted directly by the author, the author states many facts beyond the people she is directly interviewing... and then the text doesn't provide any form of bibliography to back up these (sometimes alarming, shocking, or even dubious) claims. But even with this weakness noted, the text's strengths via its case studies are truly remarkable, and show the pressing need for a more systematic - and documented - examination of this particular topic. This is a book that will shock you. It will pull at your heart strings. It will make you cheer and cry and scream out at the people involved "WTF ARE YOU DOING!!!!!!". And in these regards, it truly is a phenomenal book. Very much recommended.

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  • Started reading
  • 21 June, 2021: Finished reading
  • 21 June, 2021: Reviewed