Coming To A Neighborhood Near You — Book Review
December 17th, 2025
Strictly Haresay
By Lisa Hare on Wednesday, December 10, 2025
Coming To A Neighborhood Near You — Book Review
In my recent newsletter I sent out to my Reader List—those who follow my work beyond the scope of my duties here at SCJS—I offered some gift ideas for the season, including a couple books I thought were good, both of which are releases by well-known authors. As good as those particular reads are, I would also recommend buying books that are available by our local authors.
Truth is, we have some remarkable talent, and very interesting stuff generated right here in our home state, and as we encourage people to “shop home for the holidays” in support of our local businesses, it is equally important to remember to support our local independent artisans and the work they do, as well. Especially our writers. (Not that I’m biased or anything.)
One recent release that is definitely worth consideration is written by a friend of mine from eastern Nebraska—Jim Reese. The name of the book is Coming To A Neighborhood Near You. As associate professor of English at Mount Marty University in Yankton, SD, Reese spent 14 years in residency for the National Endowment for the Arts’ interagency initiative with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where he established Yankton Federal Prison Camp’s first creative writing and publishing workshop. Through this program, Reese worked with men and women in prison to develop, edit and produce stories from “system-impacted” students.
Coming To A Neighborhood near You is Reese’s account, not only of those experiences, but his own attempt at grappling with his grief over the rape and murder of his teenage friend years ago by a fellow classmate.
The book is at once an investigative memoir of crime and punishment, and a plea for criminal justice reform. Speaking out from the heart of a culture with a not- so-distant history of hanging people for crimes such as cattle and horse theft, in this book, Reese wrestles with his own fear and sorrow, while seeking to understand the conflux of influences—addiction, trauma, violence—that contribute to criminal behavior.
Through his experiences in working with inmates to explore writing as a means of expression, emotional release, and coping, Reese shares his findings and frustrations with a system largely disinterested in “going there.” He writes, “If you really want to make American great again, or even just a little bit better, you can’t just don a red trucker hat—you have to have empathy; you have to keep trying to do the right thing. Tools. There are so many tools we could be using and we choose not to.”
Pushing past the over-simplification of right and wrong, legal and illegal, Reese digs deep into the ethos of both the correctional system, and the culture it serves, challenging his readers to reconsider how they view crime—those who commit it, as well as the present punishment system supposedly designed to help curtail it.
As Reese’s book title suggests, he posits the question: once a person has served their time and is released, wouldn’t it be nice to know he or she has developed some skills? The book is a great read for anyone interested in taking more than just a glancing look at our law enforcement and correctional systems and policies, as well as the social attitudes and edicts that ripple through those institutions.
