Co - written by a woman who served three years in a California state prison, 7 on 10 is not her story but takes from some of the struggles she had overcoming addiction while incarcerated.

 

Mary, a former teacher and basketball coach has been sentenced to ten years in prison for committing vehicular manslaughter in an alcohol-induced blackout. She is put into a 9 x 12 cell with Nessy, a powerful ex-drug dealer and lifer in for murder in the second degree, working her way toward parole after serving her minimum fifteen years. Mary begins to navigate prison life, fighting her way through a rough group of African American women in order to play basketball, an attempt to escape the reality of her situation. Nessy buries herself in books, classes and the hope of eventual release. But these women have one thing in common; they have both taken a life and must come to terms with that reality especially if they hope to make it home.  Mary is a reminder to Nessy of the free world that awaits her while Nessy helps Mary face the alcoholism that threatens to keep her from returning to that world.  Eventually a dangerous inmate from Nessy’s old life returns to prison and Mary finds herself caught in the web of Nessy’s complicated, dark history and prison politics. The past becomes the present and forces them both to make choices that test their character, their friendship and what it means to be truly free.  In the end the story is not that of one woman but many, who have landed in a twisted up world that they must now share. It’s about their relationships, reliance on one another to survive and the ever present shadow of addiction that looms over all of them. It’s about freedom, the taking, the giving and how we may come to truly possess it.