"Life with no parole for fifty years. That's what my paperwork reads. I saw it in print the day I arrived." So begins Patty Prewitt's epistolary memoir, Trying to Catch Lightning in a Jar, describing the first eighteen years of her incarceration in various Missouri women's prisons. Her letters tell the nightmarish story of incarceration while also describing her daily attempts at making the best of the situation with keen observation, humor, and compassion for those around her. Patty served thirty-eight years before her sentence was commuted.