"A few years ago, Joe Hallinan, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, met a tough law-and-order Texan named Jack Kyle, who had been a Texas prison warden in the 1960s and had worked in the penal system nearly all his adult life. It used to be, Kyle told Hallinan, that nobody wanted prisons. But after the Texas economy went bust in the mid-1980s, people began to reconsider prisons, and "now, ever'body wants 'em." Kyle believed in locking people up...

"When Boady Sanden first receives the case of Elijah Matthews, he's certain there's not much he can do. Elijah, who believes himself to be a prophet, has been locked up in a psychiatric hospital for the past four years, convicted of brutally murdering the pastor of a megachurch. But as a law professor working for the Innocence Project, Boady agrees to look into Elijah's file. When he does, he is alarmed to find threads that lead back to the death...

When Dr. John Snow first traced an outbreak of cholera to a water pump in the Soho district of London in 1854, the field of epidemiology was born. Taking the same public health approaches and tools that have successfully tracked epidemics of flu, tuberculosis, and AIDS over the intervening one hundred and fifty years, the author makes the case that our current unprecedented level of imprisonment has become an epidemic, a plague upon our body politic....

"Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions-affection, despair, and hope. In a...

Stanko, an inmate in the South Carolina correctional system, offers a look at prison life from the inside, narrating his experiences from pre-trail detention to all aspects of incarcerated life, including food, health care, violence, prisoner relationships, and maintaining communication with the outside world.

In the United States, Black men are almost six times more likely to be imprisoned than white men. This disproportionate impact can be traced back to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the criminalization of Black people into the modern day. With growing awareness about unfair treatment in the justice system, more and more people are calling for change. Read more about the history and causes of mass incarceration and how activists are reforming and rethinking...

"Tessa Jamison couldn't have imagined anything worse than losing her beloved twin girls and husband--until she was convicted of their murder. For ten years, she has counted off the days in Florida's Correctional Center for Women, fully expecting to die behind bars. Fighting to prove her innocence holds little appeal now that her family's gone. But on one extraordinary day, her lawyers announce that Tessa's conviction has been overturned due to a technicality,...

Reflects upon the history and future of the prison system.

A pioneering book on prisons in West Africa, Colonial Systems of Control: Criminal Justice in Nigeria is the first comprehensive presentation of life inside a West African prison. Chapters by prisoners inside Kirikiri maximum security prison in Lagos, Nigeria are published alongside chapters by scholars and activists. While prisoners document the daily realities and struggles of life inside a Nigerian prison, scholar and human rights activist Viviane...