Overall, C.D. Wright explores many components of the prisons she visits. Most of her poems include snippets of dialogue from the inmates themselves but she does not let their voices be heard in vain. As the collection progresses, she goes into how underprivileged the inmates are, which opens the door to her talking about how free-worlders are lucky to get to be unrestricted. She wants her readers to sit and resonate with the first-hand experiences of the imprisoned voices and then shock readers with the statistics of what the “prison industrial complex” means to the outside world. It benefits certain people in society (stockholders of PZN) while misusing the lives of victims that fell into a pit of crime, even if it is a small pit, like cashing
