Books: The Convictions of an Ex-Con

MY SHADOW RAN FAST by Bill Sands. 212 pages. Prentice-Hall. $4.95.

Mother was a coldly sadistic disciplinarian. Father was a well-intentioned fuddy-dud. Except for the fact that Father was also a judge, the story sounds like the childhood of thousands of people who end up in psychiatrists' offices. But Bill Sands ended up not on a couch but on "the Shelf"—jailbird slang for the solitary-confinement cells at San Quentin prison. Before he was 21, Sands was serving time on three convictions for armed robbery, with sentences in each of from one year to life, and had won a reputation as a con...

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