El Lío del Gringo: Fear, Greed, and Survival in a Dominican Prison
A gripping work of literary non-fiction and a raw, on-the-ground ethnography of life inside a Dominican prison, written by a Ph.D. anthropologist.

He sold a sailboat. Two days later, it sank, killing twenty-nine people. For a Dominican government under pressure from the U.S. to crack down on illegal migration, the American who owned the boat was the perfect scapegoat.
In this gripping, true story, Ph.D. anthropologist Timothy Schwartz recounts his harrowing journey after being arrested and imprisoned in the Dominican Republic, accused of organizing a human trafficking voyage that he had nothing to do with. What began as a personal nightmare became an unprecedented feat of participant-observation, a forced entry into the brutal and complex society of a developing world prison.

While fighting for his life and freedom from the grips of a corrupt legal system, Schwartz used his anthropological training to document the world around him. This book is more than just a memoir; it is a raw, on-the-ground ethnography that exposes the corrupt structures of power and abuse in a country that is widely regarded as one of the United States' great democratic and neoliberal success stories.

Inside, you will discover:

• A Detailed Ethnography of Prison Life: An unflinching look at the prison's black-market economy and the "La Comisión," the shadow government that controls the prison, a group of the most violent criminals inside the prison.
• The Human Face of a Broken System: Intimate portraits of the men inside-from powerful gang leaders and narcotraffickers to the mentally ill and the wrongfully accused.
• An Exposé of Systemic Corruption: A firsthand account of how the Dominican justice system --police chiefs, DAs, judges, and defense attorneys-profit from an institutionalized system of payoffs and leveraging their power to engage in their own criminal activities, from drug trafficking to heists to murder.
• A Story of Unthinkable Resilience: A heart-pounding narrative of one man's fight to survive, clear his name, and find a path to freedom against overwhelming odds.

For readers of gripping non-fiction works like Papillon and Midnight Express, and for students and scholars of anthropology, Latin American studies, and human rights, this book is both a page-turning story of survival and a vital piece of ethnographic research that will find a place among the ethnographic classics