Here are 100 books that The Edge of Doubt fans have personally recommended if you like
The Edge of Doubt.
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I’ve always been drawn to stories about wrongful convictions. I can think of nothing worse than losing your freedom for something you did not do. More importantly, I think it’s important to hold those responsible accountable. I believe in the sentiment that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to have one innocent man convicted.
This book deals with the death penalty. The author covers several cases involving people who were on death row and were subsequently found to be innocent.
The book also covers related topics, such as mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, racial bias, prison overcrowding, cruel and unusual sentences for minors, the psychological impact of long-term solitary confinement, and a host of other crime and punishment issues.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN, JAMIE FOXX, AND BRIE LARSON.
A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, ESQUIRE, AND TIME BOOK OF THE YEAR.
A #1 New York Times bestseller, this is a powerful, true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix America's broken justice system, as seen in the HBO documentary True Justice.
The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. One in every 15 people born there today is expected to go
to prison. For black men this figure rises to one…
I’ve always been drawn to stories about wrongful convictions. I can think of nothing worse than losing your freedom for something you did not do. More importantly, I think it’s important to hold those responsible accountable. I believe in the sentiment that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to have one innocent man convicted.
This book covers how junk science leads to wrongful convictions. In this instance, it is bite analysis. The two men at the center of this story are Steven Hayne, the cadaver King, and Michael West, the Country Dentist.
The author focuses on one case, but these two men are responsible for several questionable convictions based solely on their testimony. As bad as these two are, you will be equally outraged by the incompetent judges, jurors, prosecutors, and defense attorneys that populate the stories of wrongful convictions covered in this book.
At the heart of the first is Dr. Steven Hayne, a doctor the State of Mississippi employed as its de facto medical examiner for two decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, he performed anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 autopsies per year, five times more than is recommended, all at night, in the basement of a local morgue and flower shop. Autopsy reports claimed organs had been observed and weighed when, in reality, they had been surgically removed from the body years before. But Hayne was the only game in town. He also often…
I’ve always been drawn to stories about wrongful convictions. I can think of nothing worse than losing your freedom for something you did not do. More importantly, I think it’s important to hold those responsible accountable. I believe in the sentiment that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to have one innocent man convicted.
If you were to read just one book about what it is like to be wrongfully convicted, choose this book. This is an unbelievable story of one man’s wrongful conviction and the twenty-five years he spent trying to prove his innocence.
Not only is this a powerful story, but it is also beautifully written. I consider it a classic equal to the fiction classic The Count of Monte Cristo.
On August 13, 1986, just one day after his thirty-second birthday, Michael Morton went to work at his usual time. By the end of the day, his wife Christine had been savagely bludgeoned to death in the couple's bed-and the Williamson County Sherriff's office in Texas wasted no time in pinning her murder on Michael, despite an absolute lack of physical evidence. Michael was swiftly sentenced to life in prison for a crime he had not committed. He mourned his wife from a prison cell. He lost all contact with their son. Life, as he knew it, was over.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I’ve always been drawn to stories about wrongful convictions. I can think of nothing worse than losing your freedom for something you did not do. More importantly, I think it’s important to hold those responsible accountable. I believe in the sentiment that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to have one innocent man convicted.
This book covers false confessions, which comprise a good portion of wrongful conviction cases. This story is even more unbelievable because there was not just one false confession but six involving the same crime.
If you believe no one would confess to a crime they did not commit, read this book. If you want to learn how police use lies, deception, and intimidation to obtain a false confession, read this book.
This story has also been covered in the documentary The Beatrice Six.
Six Times More Explosive Than 'Making A Murderer'!
"John Ferak has carved his necessary true-crime niche with another fascinating exploration of unalloyed evil in overlooked places, and a dysfunctional judicial system. A chilling piece of journalism."—Ron Franscell, author of THE DARKEST NIGHT and MORGUE: A LIFE IN DEATH
From The Bestselling Author of BODY OF PROOF and DIXIE'S LAST STAND
Everyone felt the same way: small-town Nebraska widow Helen Wilson didn’t have an ounce of meanness inside her body. Then on February 5, 1985, one of the coldest nights on record, the unthinkable happened. The sixty-eight-year-old resident was murdered inside…
I’m an investigative journalist and author, and a decade ago I began digging into the child welfare system—what we call the patchwork web of child protection agencies around the country. The more I learned, the more I realized how this system, which is ostensibly to help children in need, is actually perpetrating deep and lasting harm on generations of children and families. These books have helped me understand how we punish poor people instead of helping them, and how our racist systems harm Black and Indigenous children. They’ve also helped me to sit with the reality of child abuse, and begin to see a different way of preventing harm and healing those who’ve been hurt.
Two high-profile activists have edited this anthology, which tackles the problem of how to address harm without incarcerating people.
A lot of people get stuck on abolition because they see it as a tearing down of a system, without understanding what new structures we’d need to build in its place. These brilliant thinkers grapple with what a more humane and accountable process would look like.
I particularly recommend the chapter on the transformative justice approach to ending child sexual abuse.
Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Community-based approaches to preventing crime and repairing its damage have existed for centuries. However, in the punative atmosphere of contemporary criminal justice systems, they are often marginalized and operate under the radar. Beyond Survival puts these strategies front and center as real alternatives to today’s failed models of confinement and “correction.”
In this collection, a diverse group of authors focuses on concrete and practical forms of redress and accountability, assessing existing practices and marking paths forward. They use a variety…
I am intrigued by the diversity of human responses to suffering. As a social scientist, I've had the great fortune to carry out research in Israel, Okinawa (Japan), and the US. People in each of these countries have experienced horrific events, and they deal with the suffering they’ve endured in very different ways. In Israel and Okinawa, people seem to understand that suffering is a natural part of life and come together to deal with the aftermath of tragedy. In the US, in contrast, we tend to treat tragedy as an individual trauma that leads to emotional pathology, and our responses tend to be limited to therapy, medicine, and drugs.
I cannot get Shayne’s story out of my mind! It tells the stories of six very different individuals from diverse backgrounds with various access to health care and other resources. All six struggle with mental illness. And all six end up incarcerated and, finally, dead. But it’s Shayne’s story that I (and my students) can’t stop thinking about.
Shayne was a bright and beautiful child who grew up in a close and loving family. By the time she was eleven, Shayne had begun to make inappropriate comments, sneak out of her house at night, and lose interest in school. At age fourteen, she was found in a park with a young man and some beer. She refused to tell her therapist what she had been doing there but mentioned that she felt people could read her mind. A physician who met her just the one time diagnosed her as psychotic…
Crazy in America shows how people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, and other serious psychological illnesses are regularly incarcerated because alternative care is not available. Once behind bars, they are frequently punished again for behaviour that is psychotic, not criminal. A compelling and important examination of a shocking human rights abuse in our midst, Crazy in America is an indictment of a society that incarcerates its weakest and most vulnerable citizens , causing them to emerge sicker and more damaged.
I have been captivated by the study of prisons since my early college years. The fact that prisons are so new in human history still feels mind-blowing to me. I used to think that prisons have just always been around, but when you realize they are actually new, that has major implications. This is nowhere more clear than at the beginning: how hard it was to get to the point where prisons made sense to people, to agree on how prisons should be designed and managed, and to keep on the same path when prisons very quickly started to fail. It’s still puzzling to me.
Unlike my other recommendations, this book takes a longer historical view of the prison and also provides a more sociological framework for understanding trends in penal history, focusing on the prison but also its sister punishments like parole and probation. Breaking the Pendulum focuses on the full history of the prison in the United States, from its origins to now. But more importantly, it synthesizes the state-of-the-art knowledge from punishment studies about how to think about and understand punishment: points like recognizing geographical variation rather than focusing on the national picture and recognizing that even periods that seem to be fairly homogenous in their penal policies are actually periods with a lot of hidden debate.
From there, it moves away from the standard narrative of a pendulum swinging between punitive and rehabilitative or liberal and conservative approaches to punishment to a more accurate and mixed picture, and for thinking about…
The history of criminal justice in the U.S. is often described as a pendulum, swinging back and forth between strict punishment and lenient rehabilitation. While this view is common wisdom, it is wrong. In Breaking the Pendulum, Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps systematically debunk the pendulum perspective, showing that it distorts how and why criminal justice changes. The pendulum model blinds us to the blending of penal orientations, policies, and practices, as well as the struggle between actors that shapes laws, institutions, and how we think about crime, punishment, and related issues.
Now, I’m a journalist who covers prisons—but a decade ago I was in prison myself. I’d landed there on a heroin charge after years of struggling with addiction as I bumbled my way through college. Behind bars, I read voraciously, almost as if making up for all the assignments I’d left half-done during my drug years. As I slowly learned to rebuild and reinvent myself, I also learned about recovery and hope, and the reality of our nation’s carceral system really is. Hopefully, these books might help you learn those things, too.
One thing prisons purposely do not do is teach you anything about the history of prisons. If you want to do that, you’ll have to do it on your own—and Oshinsky is such a great start. His 1996 book details the roots of Parchman prison in Mississippi and draws a line from slavery to convict leasing to modern-day penal farms.
In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity, Worse Than Slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the Civil Rights Era—and beyond.
Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman State Penitentiary was, in the pre-civil rights south, synonymous with cruelty. Now, noted historian David Oshinsky gives us the true story of the notorious prison, drawing on police records, prison documents, folklore, blues songs, and oral history, from the days of cotton-field chain gangs to the 1960s, when Parchman was…
I’m both a history buff and a criminal defense attorney. I grew up in a small North Carolina town, as the son of two educators who encouraged me to read anything I could get my hands on. My favorite stories were adventures and mysteries, especially courtroom dramas. Clarence Darrow was my historical hero, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that I would attend law school and try my hand at legal practice. I practiced criminal law for about 15 years, long enough to get a feel for how investigations and trials really work. That experience had a major impact on my own writing, and how to pick out a really fascinating true story.
The story of a horrific miscarriage of justice in rural Canada in 1959. Fourteen-year-old Steven Truscott was charged with the rape and murder of a 12-year-old schoolmate, mostly because he was the last person seen with the victim, riding a bike along a country road. Today, modern crime analysts would look at this case and see immediately that the likely perpetrator was an adult pedophile, not an adolescent boy. But at the time, local law enforcement jumped to the wrong conclusion. Steven was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging, and although the sentence was commuted on humanitarian grounds, he spent ten years in prison. It took more than four decades of work by attorneys, and a few diligent journalists, to clear Steven’s name. This book tells the whole tale.
National Bestseller Winner of the Canadian Authors Association Birks Family Foundation Award for Biography Finalist for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing
The investigation that helped Truscott get a new appeal.
In 1959, a popular schoolboy, just 14 years old, was convicted and sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of his 12-year-old classmate. That summer, Canada lost its innocence and the shocking story of Steven Truscott became imprinted on the nation’s memory. First published in 2001, “Until You Are Dead” revealed new witnesses, leads and evidence never presented to the courts.…
A chilling true story of a ten-year-old girl struggling to survive in a dysfunctional family in Russia. The sweet-natured Laura Meer dreams of a superhero and spends days trying to provide for herself while being half-neglected by her parents, who couldn’t take good care even of themselves. Her father constantly…
Throughout my academic career, my chief scholarly interest has been to assess public policy using coherent theory and rigorous empirical method.The economics of crime and justice offers a powerful framework for achieving these ends.
This book presents contrasting views on the privatization of policing: whether it is mostly a good thing, its downsides, and which aspects of policing lend themselves to privatization.
Forst argues that a blend of public and private policing can provide a more equitable and efficient delivery of policing services than can public police alone.
Manning, unfriendly to economics and management efficiency, takes a dramaturgical perspective, concluding that those paradigms are fundamentally at odds with the traditional policing mandate, which confers on the government a monopoly on the use of coercion.
The increasing reliance on private security services raises questions about the effects of privatization on the quality of public police forces, particularly in high-crime, low-income areas. In an effective pro-and-con format, two experts on policing offer two strikingly different perspectives on this trend towards privatization. In the process, they provide an unusually thoughtful discussion of the origins of both the public police and the private security sectors, the forces behind the recent growth of private security operations, and the risks to public safety posed by privatization. In his critique of privatization, Peter K. Manning focuses on issues of free market…
