A stark and honest memoir of thirty-five years spent in Canada's prison system.
Born and raised in Toronto's Regent Park, Edward Hertrich left high school in grade eleven to start working. A year later, he started dealing drugs in earnest, beginning a criminal career that resulted in him being incarcerated for thirty-five of his next forty years.
In Wasted Time, Hertrich describes his time behind bars. Once considered a serious threat to public safety, he spent much of his time at Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison that housed four hundred of Canada's most dangerous inmates, including murderers, bank robbers, and gang members, as well as - for most of his stay there - a gang of sadistic guards.
"There are many stories of Canadians who have been lost to the criminal margins of society. Too few are able to make their way back to the 'respectable' workaday world. And even in those cases, we rarely know their stories, because they are too busy dealing with life's challenges to describe them to the rest of us. Ed Hertrich is that rare writer who has seen the very depths of the underclass, con
Jonathan Kay, Journalist
"Wasted Time is anything but that as a book! It's a gritty, realistic, and highly relevant look at poverty, criminal activity, and our penal system. There is nothing here that trivializes the violence involved in a life of drug use or time spent behind bars. It's a stark - and very human - account of one man's mistakes, as well as a society's miscalculations as to the true cost of crime and punish
