There are 2.2 million people behind bars in the United States—more than any other country in the world —in greatly disproportionate demographic numbers. There are mandatory drug sentencing laws that put fathers and mothers, sometimes both, away for many years regardless of their actual direct involvement in a crime. I wrote this book because no matter how one feels about these laws, or these crimes, if 2.2 million adults are incarcerated, there are at least as many children without mothers or fathers. Having lost my mother to suicide there are many connections, stigma, shame, and the hardship of reconciling a mother’s love in spite of the events that took her away from me.
I loved this book. It is one of the most heartfelt, deeply moving picture book stories about a young person with a family member who is incarcerated.
It is sensitive and subtle and it speaks to both those dealing with a similar experience, and maybe more importantly, someone to whom this topic is unfamiliar. That is a special book. The illustrations are absolutely perfect, to match the tone and sensitivity of this story. Quite a beautiful book.
In this moving picture book, a young girl reflects on the emotions and challenges of growing up with a brother who is incarcerated. This touching story is filled with vivid illustrations and is based on the author’s childhood experiences.
An NCTE Charlotte Huck Award Honor Book • NPR Best Book of the Year • A Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book
With her older brother in prison, a young girl copes with the confusing feelings his absence creates. At times she remembers the way her brother would carry her on his shoulders or how he would make up stories to tell her…
I was born and grew up in Seoul. My bestselling debut novel has been longlisted for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2024 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. My book is inspired by my great-aunt, one of the oldest women who had escaped alone from North Korea. It is available from Harper Perennial in the U.S. and Virago in the UK. The novel’s translations continue to meet readers worldwide, including in Italy, Romania, Greece, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and South Korea.
Eileen is one of the most twisted and unconventional literary heroines I’ve ever read. Behind her quiet demeanor and dull face hides her mind, which is like a killer’s, always furious and seething.
While working at a juvenile correctional facility, Eileen meets Rebecca, another key character far removed from most women of their generation. Seductive and deceitful, Rebecca cajoles Eileen into joining her act of crime–a violent, underhanded plan to restore her idea of justice.
Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and chosen by David Sedaris as his recommended book for his Fall 2016 tour.
So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes-a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to…
I am a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cambridge University. I've been conducting autism research for 40 years, and this has taken me deep into understanding how the mind works, in both autistic and neurotypical people. I've focused in particular on two aspects of the mind, empathy and systemizing, to understand how these develop, how individual differences in these arise, and how we can celebrate such neurodiversity and provide support for people who struggle with these. My research spans psychology, neuroscience, genetics, endocrinology, clinical practice, education, and vulnerability.
Maria Cantacuzino’s favourite emotion is forgiveness. I agree with her it is a powerful emotion and a good way to live. Maria founded a unique and important charity, The Forgiveness Project, which helps victims forgive the perpetrators of their crimes by understanding their back story, and gives perpetrators a chance to understand the feelings of their victim and apologise. There is a very close link between forgiveness and empathy, because when a victim forgives a perpetrator they are setting aside the immediate desire for revenge and hate, to understand the reasons why a person might have done bad things. And when a perpetrator apologises to a victim, they are no longer seeing the person as an object but can now see the person as a subject, with feelings such as pain and loss. Maria explores the limits of forgiveness and argues there are no limits, however awful the crime. Her…
What is forgiveness? Are some acts unforgivable? Can forgiveness take the place of revenge?
Powerful real-life stories from survivors and perpetrators of crime and violence reveal the true impact of forgiveness on ordinary people worldwide. Exploring forgiveness as an alternative to resentment or retaliation, the storytellers give an honest, moving account of their experiences and what part forgiveness has played in their lives. Despite extreme circumstances, their stories open the door to a society without revenge.
All royalties from the sale of this book go to The Forgiveness Project charity.
Stories of people impacted by the criminal justice system have been key to my understanding of the system and my efforts to reform it. I knew I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer when, in law school, I represented a woman who was raped by a corrections officer in a federal prison in Connecticut. My experiences suing the police and corrections officers as a young lawyer in New York inspired 15+ years researching the realities of civil rights litigation and barriers to achieve justice. I believe that the best way to understand the realities of the criminal justice system is through the experiences of people trying to make their way through it.
Ted Conover, a journalist, wanted to better understand life as a corrections officer.
After Conover’s request to shadow a recruit at the New York State Corrections Officer Academy was denied, he decided to apply to become a corrections officer himself—and was hired.
Conover spent a year working as a corrections officer at Sing Sing, and his insights about the chaos, lack of training, and harsh culture at the institution—and the impact that serving as a corrections officer had on him psychologically and on relationships with his loved ones—were eye-opening.
After he was denied access to report on Sing Sing, one of America's most notorious high security jails, journalist Ted Conover applied to become a prison guard. As a rookie officer, or 'newjack', Conover spent a year in the unpredictable, intimidating and often violent world of America's penal system.
Unarmed and outnumbered, prison officers at one of America's toughest maximum security jails supervise 1,800 inmates, most of whom have been convicted of violent felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape. Prisoners conceal makeshift weapons to settle gang rivalries or old grudges, and officers are often attacked or caught in the crossfire. When violence…
I’m an Irish writer who is completely hooked on anything sci-fi related. I used to race home from school to do my homework as fast as possible so I could watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. The first character I ever wrote about began his life in my head as part of the Star Trek: TNG world before deciding he was too big and created his own. It’s still an area I am passionate about. Shows like Firefly, Dark Matter, Picard, etc are on my favourites list. I just love the endless possibilities with the genre. Endless exploration, hi or low tech, and incredible ships. What’s not to love?
Reading this book was a no-brainer for me. First – it has Maul in it. Actually, that’s enough of a reason. Who doesn’t love Maul?
As far as I’m concerned he’s the ultimate bad guy. You don’t mess with him, he kicks serious ass, and he looks wow! My kind of hero/anti-hero. Dark, brooding, commanding, and can stop a conversation with just one look.
He’s the type of anti-hero you can’t help but root for and this book didn’t let me (or Maul) down. Imprisoned in hell, he has to complete his mission while staying alive against seemingly insurmountable odds. Plenty of deep stares, lots of kicking-ass, and a great plot that kept me up early into the morning.
From the mind of Joe Schreiber, New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Death Troopers, comes the delirious follow-up to last year's Darth Plagueis. In a tale of retribution and survival set before the events of The Phantom Menace, Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious dispatch Sith apprentice Darth Maul on a secret mission to infiltrate a criminal empire operating from inside Cog Hive Seven--a hidden prison teeming with the galaxy's most savage criminals. There, he must contend against the scummiest and most villainous in gladiatorial death matches while carrying out his masters' clandestine commands. Failure is not an option;…
I met Karen Gedney while traveling in Mexico. She started to tell me stories about her time as a physician at a male prison in Nevada, then gave me a copy of her memoir. Once I started the book, I couldn’t put it down.
The world inside a prison is one I know nothing about. After reading her recollections of inmates, bureaucracy, successes, and terrifying encounters, I have a far better sense of this very different world.
Her bravery and candor made this a totally compelling read.
Have you ever wondered what really goes on in US prisons? Karen Gedney, the first female prison doctor in Nevada, takes you behind prison bars with such vividness that you become invested in knowing what is coming next. You will learn what it takes to survive when you’re taken hostage and what a prison doctor can teach you about dealing with difficult people. The topics in 30 Years Behind Bars are as diverse as surviving as a woman in a male-dominated hierarchy, overcoming personal trauma, the issues of racism, mental illness, HIV, executions, and cancer. The overriding theme of the…
I write character-driven thrillers, including my latest novel: Rough Justice. How did I come to write psychological character-driven thrillers? It began years ago when I went to Hollywood in 1977. This was the New Hollywood (1967 -1980), and I worked with writers whose work grabbed viewers viscerally, not with explosions but with multi-dimensional characters that would draw you into a deeply moving story. I spent countless hours working out the stories and shaping the people in them. Working closely with these great screenwriters was a rare opportunity to learn how to create complicated characters and to see how these complex people enriched storytelling.
When I was thinking about the second book I wrote in my trilogy, I knew I had to learn about violence, particularly violence in prison. What causes it, its impact, and why some people hurt themselves in prison. My brother recommended James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist, and his insights and understanding of it shaped the central character in my book. It’s troubling but fascinating reading for anyone who’s interested in understanding this.
An eye-opening, revisionist analysis of the social and psychological roots of violence argues that violence should be approached as a problem in public health and preventative medicine, rather than one of biological or moral origins, and that shame is the common denominator that links violent perpetrators.
The idea for my first novel came from a 1946 study of Alabama parolees, linking individual characteristics to the likelihood of recidivism. The outcomes were surprising in many instances: “promising factors” such as education, profession, and intelligence didn’t correlate with good behavior. This got me thinking about the lasting effectsof imprisonment. Sentences don’t necessarily end when an inmate walks out the prison door. I see this again and again in the previously incarcerated students I teach at Helena College—they’ve been released from an institution, but mental and physical imprisonment lingers, and sometimes grows. The books on this list don’t shy away from that hard reality.
This is the only piece of nonfiction on this list, but the plot is as tortuous and epic as any good novel. This book helped me understand the vast inequities inherent in our prison industry—from mandatory sentencing to privatization to the abhorrent practice of convict leasing, aptly known as “slavery by another name.” If there’s any hope of rehabilitating the country’s prison system, we must learn its history—as ugly and unjust as it might be. This is a hard read, but an immensely important one.
In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. A pioneer in criminal justice severity―from assembly-line executions to supermax isolation, from mandatory sentencing to prison privatization―Texas is the most locked-down state in the most incarcerated country in the world. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, explains how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became a template for the nation.
Drawing on the individual stories as well as authoritative research, Texas Tough reveals the true origins of America's prison juggernaut and points toward a more just and humane future.
At age eighteen, as a part-time employee of a prisoners’ rights group, I visited an archipelago of decrepit prisons, all relics of an earlier age. My job was gathering inmates’ accounts of bucket toilets, unheated cells, bugs, molds, and rats. Soon after, I began reading and writing about prison reform and its history. And in the many decades since, whether practicing or teaching criminal law, I never lost sight of prisons and their problems. Several of these five books fed my young fascination with prison reform. All of them still challenge me to imagine true and enduring reform.
Tracking the movement for prison reform to American shores, McLennan documents the grim consequences of grafting incarceration with capitalism.
In her telling, the North’s contract labor system took root amid the new industries of Jacksonian America and flourished in the Gilded Age alongside the South’s proto-plantation convict lease camps. Vast penal industrial plants in almost every state proved how foolhardy early reformers had been to think a state enterprise could long abide by its reforming ideals.
America's prison-based system of punishment has not always enjoyed the widespread political and moral legitimacy it has today. In this groundbreaking reinterpretation of penal history, Rebecca McLennan covers the periods of deep instability, popular protest, and political crisis that characterized early American prisons. She details the debates surrounding prison reform, including the limits of state power, the influence of market forces, the role of unfree labor, and the 'just deserts' of wrongdoers. McLennan also explores the system that existed between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, where private companies relied on prisoners for labor. Finally, she discusses the…
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.
Prisons were originally built for men (really, white men), not for women. But women were sent to prison, just not in big enough numbers to merit their own facilities until much later. Women were also viewed as a difficult population by reformers and prison administrators alike: Women who committed crimes were deemed so morally repugnant that they could not be rehabilitated, so the routines and purposes of prisons seemed not to apply to them (prisons were originally supposed to rehabilitate their prisoners).
As a small and unprofitable population (because they were assigned unprofitable labor like sewing and laundry), women prisoners were considered especially burdensome. Using the prison histories of three differently situated states, Rafter describes the experiences of incarcerated women and how those experiences were shaped by their unique position and the biases about women criminals.
Contemporary Research on crime, prisons, and social control has largely ignored women. Partial Justice, the only full-scale study of the origins and development of women's prisons in the United States, traces their evolution from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It shows that the character of penal treatment was involved in the very definition of womanhood for incarcerated women, a definition that varied by race and social class.Rafter traces the evolution of women's prisons, showing that it followed two markedly different models. Custodial institutions for women literally grew out of men's penitentiaries, starting from a separate room for…
