Penology

In The Faithful Executioner, Harrington vividly re-creates a life filled with stark contrasts, from the young apprentice's rigorous training under his executioner father....

John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction: a true crime story that will terrify anyone who believes in the presumption of innocence....

The Sun Does Shine is an arresting audiobook memoir of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading, written by a man who spent 30 years on death row for a crime he didn't commit....

Dan Slepian, a veteran producer for NBC’s Dateline recounts his two-decade journey navigating the broken criminal justice system to help free six innocent men.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace, and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration," and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole....

After working as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison, Shane Bauer wrote an exposé about his experiences. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America....

A leading authority on sheriffs in America investigates the impunity with which sheriffs police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics....

City of Inmates explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and Black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration....

Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle-class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor—but at age eleven, his parents’ marriage began to unravel....

With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money 10 years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to 15 months at an infamous federal correctional facility....

The state notoriously the most tough on crime also has the most humane treatment program for violent young offenders. Located in Giddings, Texas, the Capital Offenders Group is a grueling exercise in therapy and self-awareness....

For the first time, the four most popular restorative justice audiobooks in the Justice & Peacebuilding series are available in one audio volume.

Three of the nation’s leading advocates for change survey various approaches to confronting the carceral state, exploring a wide range of bold but practical interventions.

Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement - in a six-foot by nine-foot cell, 23 hours a day, in notorious Angola prison in Louisiana - all for a crime he did not commit....

The official story is that the United States has no political prisoners. The reality is that there are hundreds of people rounded up, placed behind bars, and kept there for inordinately long sentences because of their political beliefs and activities.

What happens when you pack almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society’s cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill purposefully hidden from public view? Prize-winning journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people....

Between them, the three men in the fearsome Pierrepoint dynasty executed over 800 people during a career spanning more than half a century....

An empowering memoir of courage and hope in the face of injustice, Marked for Life is the true story of Isaac Wright Jr.’s battle to win his freedom after being wrongfully imprisoned for crimes he didn’t commit, and a critical indictment of America’s judicial system....

In Captive in Iran, Maryam and Marziyeh recount their 259 days in Evin. It’s an amazing story of unyielding faith - when denying God would have meant freedom....

Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency....

Avi Steinberg is stumped. After defecting from yeshiva to Harvard, he has only a senior thesis essay on Bugs Bunny to show for his effort....

One woman's fight to provide hope for the hopeless... Seven ex-cons who changed her heart forever.…

On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment....

In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana’s Angola State Prison....

This anthology, with stories set in different prisons across the US, presents an absolutely new perspective on prison literature....