"Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data-driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost-effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But many of these so-called reforms actually widen the net, weaving in new strands of punishment and control, and bringing new populations, who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment,...

After spending forty years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, Ezekiel Cartwright has just one thing on his mind: he sets out to track down the men who set him up and then tell them, before he dies, that he has forgiven them. Cartwright finds his goal harder to achieve than he guessed, however; and before it's all over, he is compelled to take up a gun again and deal with the sons of the men who so cruelly wronged him all those years ago...

Jimmy Jayne, a reformed ex-con, is the prime suspect who will stop at nothing to prove his innocence. Homicide detectives Freeman and Vargas are close on his tail as Jimmy takes on his own investigation risking his life in the dark underbelly of Los Angeles.

When range detective Rance Dehner kills outlaw Tully Brooks, he finds that the case will not be closed so easily. Before dying, Brooks tells Dehner that he was involved in a fake bank robbery, and an innocent man has been arrested for the hold-up; his dying request is that Dehner investigate. The detective's compliance sends him to Hard Stone, Colorado, where he must deal with a high-stakes gambler, a mining engineer who's always quick to draw his...

"We all know that orange is the new black and mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow, but how much do we actually know about the structure, goals, and impact of our criminal justice system? Understanding Mass Incarceration offers the first comprehensive overview of the incarceration apparatus put in place by the world's largest jailer: the United States. Drawing on a growing body of academic and professional work, Kilgore describes in plain English...

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 Chase, a former World War II paratrooper and New England...

"In May of 1976, twenty-four-year-old Carol Menaker was impaneled with eleven others on a jury in the trial of Freddy Burton, a young Black prison inmate charged with the grisly murders of two white wardens inside Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison. After being sequestered for twenty-one days, the jury voted to convict Mr. Burton, who was then sentenced to life in prison without parole. For more than forty years, Menaker did what she could to put the...

Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indignation at the fallen state of mid-Victorian society. Crammed with persons and incidents in whose recreation nothing is accidental or spurious, containing, in its picture of the Circumlocution Office, the most witheringly exact satire of a bureaucracy we possess, Little Dorrit is a stunning...

"Delvin Walker is just a boy when his mother flees their home in the Red Row section of Chattanooga, accused of killing a white man. Taken in by Cornelius Oliver, proprietor of the town's leading Negro funeral home, he discovers the art of caring for the aggrieved, the promise of transcendence in the written word, and a rare peace in a hostile world. Yet tragedy visits them near daily, and after a series of devastating events--a lynching, a church...