It is his experience behind bars—seven years for armed robbery and felonious assault—that Thomas examines in … "Seven Long Times."

Thomas served his time in both Sing Sing and Great Meadows (Comstock), and his narrative account of what passes for life in these institutions may not be new…. [However Thomas] has written an intensely human document of one man's will for survival. (p. 10)

Thomas follows in a long tradition of prison writers: Jean Genet, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson. If his prose lacks the intensity of Genet, or the rhetorical passion of Cleaver and Jackson, it is because this book, though commenting on life inside prison, was written from the outside. The difference also stems from Thomas's seemingly apolitical nature. The appendix to his book, in which he argues for prison reform along with changes in the equally medieval system of parole, seems an afterthought...