Super Friends

In late 2008 twenty-four year old Cincinnati native Whitney Smith begins writing a blog he titles "Super Friends" from his solitary confinement cell at USP Terre Haute, where he is half-way through a 6 ½ year sentence for unarmed bank robbery. With no computer access, he mails handwritten entries to his father for posting. Before long he has hundreds, then thousands of readers from around the world. Writing about his past and present, Whit’s insightful account is scrubbed clean of self-pity and gives off an energetic ruefulness combined with a keen sense of humor. The blog entries reproduced here are interleaved for the first time with letters Whit and his father wrote to each other. This moving self-portrait provokes serious questions about the dysfunctional apparatus that is our federal prison system. As one early reviewer writes, “I am blown away by Whit's writing; his voice is clear, so funny, yet heartbreaking – and I can't stop reading."