Summary: The number of Americans who live behind bars has increased by 550 percent over the last 40 years. This has been the result of aggressive tough-on-crime legislation that had more harmful effects than lawmakers could have foreseen. Experts now see the problem but disagree on the solutions. Does incarceration limit crime, or does it simply feed into a cycle of problems that harm society and create...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Greenhaven Publishing, LLC 2018

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Young Adult Non-fiction, Call number: YA 365 MAS

Joyner, Chris

Summary: The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson' is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn't commit, and the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. The book also tells the story of Homer...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Abrams Inc. 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 364.134 JOY

Beety, Valena E.

Summary: "From a former federal prosecutor turned champion of the wrongfully convicted, this powerful and profound book follows the stories of women reclaiming their freedom and creates a new blueprint for remaking our deeply flawed criminal legal system." -- Inside front jacket flap.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Citadel Press, Kensington Publishing Corp. 2022

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 345.73 BEE

Rezaian, Jason

Summary: In July 2014, Washington Post Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian was arrested by Iranian police, accused of spying for America. The charges were absurd. Rezaian's reporting was a mix of human interest stories and political analysis. He had even served as a guide for Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown. Initially, Rezaian thought the whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding, but soon realized...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copies Available at Peninsula

1 available in Adult, Call number: B REZAIAN REZ

Dawkins, Curtis

Summary: "In this stunning debut collection, Curtis Dawkins, an MFA graduate and convicted murderer serving life without parole, takes us inside the worlds of prison and prisoners with stories that dazzle with their humor and insight, even as they describe a harsh and barren existence. In Curtis Dawkins's first short story collection, he offers a window into prison life through the eyes of his narrators...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Scribner 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Adult Fiction, Call number: FIC DAW

Summary: Seventeen teenage lawbreakers spend a day inside Rahway State Prison (later East Jersey State Prison) with some of New Jersey's most dangerous criminals. A selected group of convicts ("The Lifers") give the youth an in-your-face, no-holds-barred account about life in prison, in hopes of "scaring them straight". Twenty years later, filmmaker Arnold Shapiro catches up with both the kids and the...

Format: moving image

Publisher / Publication Date: Docurama 2003

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Documentary DVDs, Call number: DVD DOC SCA

Henry, Jessica S.

Summary: "Rodricus Crawford was convicted and sentenced to die for the murder by suffocation of his beautiful baby boy. After years on death row, evidence confirmed what Crawford had claimed all along: he was innocent, and his son had died from an undiagnosed illness. Crawford is not alone. A full one-third of all known exonerations stem from no-crime wrongful convictions. The first book to explore this...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: University of California Press 2020

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 345.73 HEN

Bauer, Shane

Summary: "A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. IIn 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Penguin Press 2018

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 365 BAU
1 available in Browsing Hot Titles, Call number: HOT TITLE

Pfaff, John F.

Summary: "Pfaff argues that existing accounts of the causes of mass incarceration are fundamentally misguided. The most widely accepted explanations--the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons--actually tell us much less than we like to think. Instead, Pfaff urges us to look at other factors, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred...

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Basic Books 2017

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 365 PFA

Castle, Jiordan

Summary: "Moving and evocative, this YA memoir-in-verse follows author Jiordan Castle's coming-of-age as her family reckons with the aftershocks of her father's imprisonment"--

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers 2023

Copies Available at Woodmere

1 available in Young Adult Non-fiction, Call number: YA 921 CAS