How One Man Found Redemption After Three Decades Behind Bars
A Review of Re-Incarceration: A True Story of Life Inside the Revolving Door of Jail by Tyke McCarthy
The term “revolving door” conjures images of grand hotel lobbies and gleaming corporate towers. For Tyke McCarthy, it meant something far different: the endless, exhausting cycle of prison cells, parole hearings, and inevitable returns to incarceration. In his unflinching memoir, Re-Incarceration, McCarthy pulls readers into a world most will never see, offering a raw, unvarnished look at what it means to spend more than half your life locked away.
The Making of a Black Sheep
What makes McCarthy’s story so compelling is its unexpected origin. Born in San Francisco in 1959 to a loving Irish Catholic family, he grew up in the comfortable upper-middle-class neighborhoods of Marin County. His father played for the San Francisco Seals. His brothers excelled at baseball. By all accounts, Tyke McCarthy had every advantage a young man could ask for.
And yet, at eight years old, he found himself face to face with the law for the first time, caught shoplifting candy, toys, and a Playboy magazine from the local grocery store. It was a harbinger of things to come.
McCarthy writes with disarming honesty about his transformation into what he calls the “jet-black sheep” of his family. The book opens with epigraphs from Ernest Hemingway and the infamous gangster John Dillinger, setting the tone for a narrative that refuses to romanticize criminal life while also refusing to wallow in self-pity.
Wind, Chrome, and Bad Decisions
Motorcycles roar through every chapter of Re-Incarceration. At twelve, McCarthy glimpsed a group of Hell’s Angels thundering down Highway 580 and was instantly, irrevocably hooked. His first motorized adventure ended in a police chase across the Golden Gate Bridge on a three-and-a-half-horsepower minibike. The California Highway Patrol officers who caught him told him he might have been the only person to ever ride a minibike across that iconic span.
This blend of audacity and recklessness would define McCarthy’s life for decades. The book recounts an astonishing criminal resume: armed bank robbery at fifteen, countless chases with police, stints in California Youth Authority facilities, state prisons, and eventually federal penitentiaries. He served time at the Florence complex in Colorado, where the notorious ADX supermax prison looms underground, earning its nickname “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.”
The Angels Among Us
Through the gritty recounting of crimes and consequences, a surprising theme emerges: the unwavering support of family and friends. McCarthy dedicates the book to Reba, the woman who became his wife, calling her “nothing short of an angel from heaven.” Their love story, woven throughout the narrative, provides the book’s emotional backbone.
One of the memoir’s most powerful scenes takes place at McCarthy’s federal sentencing for bank robbery. Thirty family members and friends filled the courtroom that morning. The judge remarked that all these people surely had better places to be, yet there they stood, supporting a man who had given them every reason to walk away.
“In my family, I was and always will be the jet-black sheep,” McCarthy writes. “But I would choose my family, no question.”
The Beast in the Bottle
McCarthy does not shy away from the role alcohol played in his downfall. Even after making a promise to himself upon his release that he would commit no more crimes, his drinking continued to sabotage his freedom. A motorcycle accident nearly killed him. Drunk-in-public charges violated his parole. Each time he thought he had escaped the revolving door, alcohol shoved him back through.
The book’s most heartbreaking passages detail the loss of “Dish,” a lifelong love who died in a house fire. Grief and alcohol combined to send McCarthy spiraling, resulting in another fourteen months behind bars. It was there, in a northern California federal prison, that he finally made his second promise: no more booze.
Life After the Door Stops Spinning
The book’s final chapters shift from darkness to light. McCarthy reunites with Reba. They buy a home together. He rebuilds a garage with his own hands, a symbolic act of construction after a lifetime of destruction. Then, while working at a demolition site, a reaction to galvanized pipe triggers five strokes that transform him into, as he puts it, “a completely different person.”
His outfield days are over. His ability to ride a chopper down the highway is in question. But through it all, Reba remains his angel, attending every physical therapy appointment, nursing him back to what health he can reclaim.
Today, McCarthy is off parole for the first time in forty years. Reba threw him an “Off-Parole Party” to celebrate. They spend their days with their granddaughter, “Teeni,” living a quiet life in Northern California. The man who once robbed banks now finds joy in lifting weights in his backyard and taking motorcycle rides with his wife.
A Story Worth Telling
Re-Incarceration is not a book that preaches or moralizes. McCarthy lets the facts speak for themselves. When asked what his thoughts were on all the crime and time behind prison walls, his answer was simple: “It was an embarrassing waste of time.”
In an era when conversations about criminal justice reform dominate headlines, McCarthy’s memoir offers something statistics cannot: a human face. It shows how cycles of incarceration perpetuate themselves, how addiction intertwines with crime, and how the bonds of family can survive even the most sustained assault.
The book ends with a wink and a warning. McCarthy admits he still catches himself planning robberies from time to time, calling them “old habits.” Reba, he jokes, gets a little too excited helping him plan. “Bonnie and Clyde, the golden years,” he writes. “We will see, stay tuned.”
Whether this is dark humor or a genuine glimpse into an addict’s mind, only time will tell. But after reading Re-Incarceration, you find yourself rooting for Tyke McCarthy to keep the revolving door closed for good.
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Re-Incarceration: A True Story of Life Inside the Revolving Door of Jail
By Tyke McCarthy Parker Publishers, 2025
