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Hunt is less enthusiastic about the U.S. penal system. Even the best prisons, he says, "force the prisoner to be infantile and dependent." Nevertheless, in the most moving pages of the book, Hunt describes how life in prison helps Alfredo Ortiz to rescue the life he has practically lost. Alfredo, an undernourished runt who at 19 weighs 99 Ibs. and has a verbal IQ of 85, enrolls in prison school and pulls himself up in only a year from fifth-grade level to a high school diploma. He goes on to become a first-rate jailhouse lawyer, fighting his case from appeal to appeal. As the book ends, Alfredo's latest petition for a retrial, which has gathered dust for more than a year on the desk of a New York judge, is at last read and approved. "It is a task to retain self-respect," Alfredo writes grimly, "when you are required to be a participant in man's game of inhumanity." It is a game, Hunt suggests, that 200 million can play. ·Brad Darrach