Omaha World Herald Review: Omaha native’s book sounds a call for prison reform

September 19th, 2025

Geitner Simmons Special to The World-Herald 9/15/25

Coming to a Neighborhood Near You: The Repercussions of Crime and Punishment,” by Jim Reese, Potomac Books, the University of Nebraska Press, 2025.

Writers discover valuable truths when they’re able to immerse themselves directly in a subject. Omaha native Jim Reese draws on such personal experience in this new book, an investigative memoir that sounds a clarion call for prison reform.

After working with inmates for 14 years as a creative writing instructor in state and federal prisons, he has authored this compelling study examining the failures of our prison system and the staggering ramifications that addiction and childhood trauma have for the incarcerated.

In cogent, deeply personal prose, he also points out the lingering trauma that violence can have for “secondary victims” such as family and friends, with the heinous 1990 murder of 17-year-old babysitter Christina O’Day in Millard a central example. Reese was a friend and classmate of O’Day at Millard South High School.

“The lives of everyone who knew Christina changed forever. … We are grieving, lost and confused,” writes Reese, an associate professor of English and director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty University in Yankton, South Dakota.

True crime stories are enormously popular, Reese writes, but they almost universally fail to examine a brutal crime’s aftermath as trauma lingers for secondary victims.

The core of Reese’s book is a fervent, well-informed cry for the nation’s prison system to make a solid commitment to inmate addiction treatment and education services. He points to the common indifference of many prison leaders and staffers, though he also notes thoughtful exceptions and examples of effective programs.

He’s right in arguing that an energetic pursuit of inmate rehabilitation is not only humane but in the public interest. Most inmates are not lifers, and recidivism rates tend to be high. The title of Reese’s book comes from a prison official who told him the public needs to understand that inmates who are released without serious rehabilitation and support will be “coming to a neighborhood near you.”

Part of this needed understanding, Reese argues, must involve fuller recognition of the enormous downstream harm from addiction. In his prison classes in South Dakota and San Quentin over 14 years, inmates were directed to write about their life experiences. The essays awakened Reese to the colossal scale of damage wrought by trauma and addiction.

Reese emerged from that experience resolved to share what he learned and promote a much-needed societal discussion. He doesn’t excuse those who commit heinous crimes — public safety must always be the main priority, he writes. But he is attempting to wake the nation to the ongoing social costs from revolving door criminal justice.

In his examination of addiction’s harm, Reese repeatedly turns the spotlight on himself. His book is a frank and sometimes startling self-examination of his struggles and fears stemming from his own alcoholism.

Many readers will disagree with his call to legalize drugs, but at a minimum, one can understand his perspective after reading his description of addiction’s destructive power.

Reese participated in more than 250 hours of ride-alongs with police, and the experience heightened his respect for law enforcement personnel while at the same time deepening his awareness of the pervasiveness of social trauma. He is particularly blunt in criticizing how current laws and protocols routinely fail victims of domestic violence at the very moment when help for them is most needed.

Reese found it greatly encouraging that the inmates’ writing frequently helped them come to terms with themselves. It’s lamentable that agencies have ended funding of the writing program.

Reese is a poet and humorist, and he enjoys making people laugh. But he adds: “I also feel compelled — dare I say, even a little obligated — to tell society what I’ve learned. How else do we move forward?”

Geitner Simmons, a former World-Herald editorial page editor, writes news articles at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.