Michael G. Santos hardly seems like a reliable narrator. As a middle-class kid in Seattle, he was “a mediocre student” in high school, and then, three years after graduation, he chose drug trafficking as a profession. He lived “arrogantly,” driving Porsches and wearing Cartier diamonds, and he owned an offshore race boat called the Outlaw. He was eventually charged with distributing cocaine and, in 1987, sentenced to 45 years in prison. In his book, he presents accounts of the sex, violence and drugs found behind bars. Yet he knows that a man like him — “a long-term prisoner” — is seen as “prone to prevarication or exaggeration.” Few would have believed the Abu Ghraib stories if they’d come from the prisoners, he points out. It was the pictures that made them real.