“Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade,” Malcolm X said in his landmark 1965 The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “This impression,” he said, “is due entirely to my prison studies.”

Malcolm Little dropped out of high school in the Boston area at age fifteen before completing ninth grade. Known on the streets as “Detroit Red,” he pursued sundry hustles. In late 1946, he was caught for a string of home burglaries in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and received an eight-to-ten-year prison sentence. When he was released on parole in 1952, he was Malcolm X.

If the storyline seems familiar, that is because it has been well told, first by Malcolm (with Alex Haley), later by filmmaker Spike Lee, and more recently by the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographers Manning Marable and Les and Tamara Payne.

However, by focusing only on the early years of his life, independent scholar Patrick Parr adds new depth to our understanding of Malcolm’s rise from the depths of the criminal justice system to the world stage. Parr’s Malcolm Before X is an important addition to the literature on both black nationalism and the US criminal justice system.

Parr’s initial chronology is a bit unorthodox. The book opens with Malcolm leading a crew of small-time burglars in Roxbury. (That the circle included white women would contribute to Malcolm’s harsh sentence.) Rather than move forward to prison, Parr circles back to the figurehead’s ancestral roots in Mali. A whirlwind tour through Grenada, Georgia, Canada, Philadelphia, Omaha, and East Lansing brings us back to the Massachusetts prison system.

At Charlestown State Prison, Malcolm famously meets the figure who first lit an intellectual fire under him: John Elton Bembry, known on the inside as “Bimbi.” In his autobiography, X describes Bembry as the Charlestown prison library’s “best customer,” a jailhouse scholar with a keen interest in Henry David Thoreau. He also briefly referred to Bembry as an “old-time burglar [who] had been in many prisons.”

Drawing upon prison records, Parr brings out fascinating details of Bembry’s peripatetic life during the Depression era. After completing high school in Raleigh, North Carolina, Bembry moved to New York City, where gambling became his means of survival. He eventually drifted to Los Angeles, engaging in petty crime. A pair of purse-snatching convictions then sent him to San Quentin, where he worked on the road crew and studied in the prison library.

Upon his departure from Quentin in 1940, officials told Bembry to leave California. He then bounced his way back east, landing behind bars in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. In more ways than one, Bembry’s knowledge of broader horizons set Malcolm on course. Bimbi, Malcolm recalled, told me that “I had some brains [and] should use them.”

It was at the Norfolk Prison Colony where Malcolm fully came of age. Built by prison laborers in the late 1920s, thirty-five miles south of Boston, Norfolk was designed along the lines of a large vocational school, with shops producing garments, shoes, and furniture. It also encouraged higher intellectual pursuits, complete with a 15,000-volume library when Malcolm entered in 1948.

Fortuitously for Malcolm, he arrived when Norfolk’s dedicated librarian, Massachusetts Institute of Technology–trained George MacGraw, launched a rigorous high-school education program. MacGraw later said that working with incarcerated people is the “most satisfying work in the world.” Parr walks us through the daily regimen for Malcolm and his peers, quoting an article in the prison newspaper that gave a glowing review to an English teacher who captivated students with a lecture on the apostrophe.

Parr presents similarly granular details of the drudgery Malcolm endured while working in Norfolk’s laundry room. A 1949 article in the Norfolk paper documented “Red Little’s” hand-finishing work pleating pants and collars. The same story touted the laundry team’s work cleaning nearly 78,000 items over the course of a previous month.

Malcolm, of course, was far more inspired by the life of the mind. By the fall of 1948, he was an active member of the Norfolk Prison Colony Debating Society. Just before the November presidential election, Little was assigned the unenviable task of arguing the case for Republican Thomas Dewey. The reviews from his peers were favorable.

Malcolm’s embrace of Islam was unique at Norfolk. By late 1948, he was writing letters to his brother Philbert that mentioned Allah. That same year, he declined to participate in the prison’s Christmas celebration. Over the next few months, Malcolm shaved his head, prayed regularly, and rejected pork. This transformation was largely self-directed: by the time he was transferred back to Charlestown in early 1950, Malcolm X was one of only three Muslims at Norfolk.

As with any major historical figure, the task for biographers is to explain the circumstances and conditions that produced the subject. Thoroughly researched and crisply written, Parr’s work provides the most complete examination yet of Malcolm’s prison years. Without the influence of John Elton Bembry, George MacGraw, or many of his fellow incarcerees, Malcolm X may never have arisen.