Behind the Gates of Gomorrah: A Year with the Criminally by Stephen Seager

A darker twist on Orange is the hot Black, this actual insider's account can provide an eye-opening look at the nation’s biggest state-run forensic sanatorium, a facility that homes the real-life Hannibal Lecters of the world.

Psychiatrist Stephen Seager used to be no stranger to locked psych wards whilst he authorised a task at California’s Gorman kingdom health facility, identified in the community as “Gomorrah,” yet not anything can have ready him for what he encountered while he stepped via its gates, a triple sally port in the back of the twenty-foot partitions crowned with shining coils of razor cord. Gorman nation is without doubt one of the nation’s biggest forensic psychological hospitals, devoted to treating the criminally insane. Unit C, the place Seager used to be assigned, used to be reserved for the “bad actors,” the mass murderers, serial killers, and the real-life Hannibal Lecters of the world.

Against a backdrop of surreal beauty—a verdant campus-like environment the place peacocks strolled the grounds—is a spot of outstanding violence, a spot the place a small employees of clinicians are anticipated to regulate a risky inhabitants of prison-hardened ex-cons, the place lone therapists lead sharing circles with sociopaths, the place a bootleg underground economic climate prospers, and the place sufferers and physicians frequently degree their lives in response to how briskly they could run. To pass throughout the gates of Gomorrah is to go into a looking-glass global, the place the trimmings of the conventional calendar 12 months exist—Halloween dances and xmas events (complete with visits from Santa), springtime softball groups and basketball leagues, yet marked with paroxysms of brutality (Santa is going berserk), and peopled by way of figures from our nightmares.

Behind the Gates of Gomorrah gives an eye-opening glance inside of a facility to which few humans have ever had entry. sincere, rueful, and every now and then darkly humorous, Seager’s gripping account of his rookie yr blends memoir with a story technology, explaining either the aberrant brain and his personal, every now and then incomprehensible, selection to stay in a role with a perilously steep studying curve.