Where It All Goes Down
In the Pokey and With the Old Folks
This may come as a huge surprise, but Progress, the juvenile jail where Reese spends most of his time, isn't exactly Disney Land. The inmates, who are ages twelve to sixteen and serving time for crimes that range from skipping school to first-degree murder, are often volatile and violent.
Being behind bars has a dehumanizing effect. "Being at Progress, hearing the bars slam or standing in the halls waiting for somebody to unlock one of the steel doors, made me feel like maybe I was an animal or something" (6.14), Reese tells us. Also, the stress of that environment is physically and emotionally wearing. "Sadness was like sucking on me and taking the life out of my body," Reese says at one point. "I felt so weak, I was having trouble standing up" (27.8). Wowser.
The secondary setting is Evergreen, the eldercare facility where Reese goes ten days a month for the prison work program. In some ways, it's meant to serve as a mirror for Progress. The residents aren't allowed to leave, and Reese tells us "the rooms on the rest floor looked a little like our quarters at Progress" (7.16). At the same time, though, Evergreen is a happy place for Reese. He's so grateful to be there, it's almost as though he's on vacation (albeit with a lot of old, racist, white people). "I felt free at Evergreen," he tells us. "The staff treated me good" (29.10). Working there makes Reese feel like a regular person, which is all he's ever wanted.
Zooming out, we know that Progress is located in upstate New York. From a comment that Icy makes about Hillary Clinton dropping out of the presidential election, we know the year is 2008 (about two years before the book was published). Reese is from a neighborhood in New York City, and occasionally we receive dispatches from this world via his friends and family, who write to him.
We know that Reese's life outside was tough based on what he tells us about his family—his mother is a drug addict, and his dad is an alcoholic and an abuser. But there's also a lot of violence outside his home. Letters from Reese's sister Icy and his friend Kevin discuss two separate neighborhood shootings. The sad thing is that such shootings are so common that Reese can't really bring himself to care. "In my life, somebody was always being shot or being beat up or killed" (21.8), he tells us. While Reese can't get shot behind bars, the threat of violence is always there.