One of Buzzfeed's 25 New And Upcoming Books You Won't Be Able To Put Down and one of LitHub's Best New Nonfiction to Read This November The Uninnocent is so elegantly crafted that the pleasure of reading it nearly overrides its devastating subject matter . . . a story of radical empathy, a triumph of care and forgiveness. --Stephanie Danler, author of Stray and Sweetbitter A harrowing intellectual reckoning with crime, mercy, justice and heartbreak through the lens of a murder On a Thursday morning in June 2010, Katharine Blake's sixteen-year-old cousin walked to a nearby bike path with a boxcutter, and killed a young boy he didn't know. It was a psychological break that tore through his brain, and into the hearts of those who loved both boys--one brutally killed, the other sentenced to die at Angola, one of the country's most notorious prisons. In The Uninnocent, Blake, a law student at Stanford at the time of the crime, wrestles with the implications of her cousin's break, as well as the broken machinations of America's justice system. As her cousin languished in a cell on death row, where he was assigned for his own protection, Blake struggled to keep her faith in the system she was training to join. Consumed with understanding her family's new reality, Blake became obsessed with heartbreak, seeing it everywhere: in her cousin's isolation, in the loss at the center of the crime, in the students she taught at various prisons, in the way our justice system breaks rather than mends, in the history of her parents and their violent childhoods. As she delves into a history of heartbreak--through science, medicine, and literature--and chronicles the uneasy yet ultimately tender bond she forms with her cousin, Blake asks probing questions about justice, faith, inheritance, family, and, most of all, mercy. Sensitive, singular, and powerful, effortlessly bridging memoir, essay, and legalese, The Uninnocent is a reckoning with the unimaginable, unforgettable, and seemly irredeemable. With curiosity and vulnerability, Blake unravels a distressed tapestry, finding solace in both its tearing and its mending.

The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political culture among dissidents since the 1970s-a culture that laid the foundation for the 2011 Syrian Revolution. The emergence of prison literature as a specific genre helped articulate opposition to authoritarian states, including the Assad regime. However, the significance of Syrian prison literature goes beyond a form of witnessing, expressing creative opposition, and illuminating the larger cultural and historical backstory of the Syrian uprising. Prison literature, in all its diversity, challenges the narrative structures and conventional language of human rights. In doing so, prison literature has played an essential role in generating the "experimental shift" in Arabic literature since the 1960s. Taleghani's groundbreaking work explores prison writing's critical role in resistance movements in Syria, the evolution of Arabic literature, and the development of a global human rights.

Many organizations are engaged in a race to prevent the execution by lethal injection of death sentenced prisoners in Texas (and elsewhere in the USA). Some of these men and women claim to be completely innocent, as described in this book. Texas is the most punitive place within one of the harshest penal systems in the world. Michael O'Brien - who was himself wrongly convicted of murder - dissects a selection of Death Row cases with the eye of a man who has spent years watching how miscarriages of justice happen and why. He explains how practitioners, politicians and others are in denial and how livelihoods depend on a conveyer belt from the courts to the execution chamber. Aided by bias, discrimination and prejudice he describes a killing process triggered by unfair trials, supposed expert evidence and closed minds. This is just one hallmark of a country obsessed with guns, violence and the ultimate penalty. No legal system should take away human lives, especially one tarnished by defects of the kind the author sets out in this book. Extract: 'Can you just imagine being an individual who is innocent but facing execution, whether in Texas or elsewhere? Or you were on Death Row but you did not take part in any killings, just got caught up in the hysteria? Can you picture the pressure and abject loneliness of serving 15 years or more, and then the State setting a date to kill you?'

Current Issues in Corrections explores a variety of the most timely and salient challenges facing the correctional system. The text is comprised of chapters written by experts in the field who have experience as both academic and criminal justice practitioners.The book begins with an exploration of issues in private corrections and then moves forward to discuss the history of the field, legal issues, jails, diversion programs, community corrections, institutional corrections, correctional career concerns, and the interaction of the system with women, people of color, and juveniles. The text concludes by considering the future of capital punishment in America and examining the field of corrections from a human rights perspective. Each chapter includes pre-reading and post-reading questions to stimulate reflection and critical thinking. Featuring a unique balance of theory and practice, Current Issues in Corrections is an exemplary textbook for courses in criminal justice and corrections.

The overall rate of incarceration in the United States has been on the rise since 1970s, skyrocketing during Ronald Reagan's presidency, and recently reaching unprecedented highs. Looking for innovative solutions to the crises produced by gigantic prison populations, Florida's Department of Corrections claims to have found a partial remedy in the form of faith and character-based correctional institutions (FCBIs). While claiming to be open to all religious traditions, FCBIs are almost always run by Protestants situated within the politics of the Christian right. The religious programming is typically run by the incarcerated along with volunteers from outside the prison. Stoddard takes the reader deep inside FCBIs, analyzing the subtle meanings and difficult choices with which the incarcerated, prison administrators, staff, and chaplains grapple every day. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research and historical analysis, Brad Stoddard argues that FCBIs build on and demonstrate the compatibility of conservative Christian politics and neoliberal economics. Even without authoritative data on whether FCBIs are assisting rehabilitation and reducing recidivism rates, similar programs are appearing across the nation-only Iowa has declared them illegal under non-establishment-of-religion statutes. Exposing the intricate connections among incarceration, neoliberal economics, and religious freedom, Stoddard makes a timely contribution to debates about religion's role in American society.

The iconic New York Times bestseller that 'struck the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter' (Ibram X. Kendi) Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub and Book Riot Once in a great while a book comes along that radically changes our understanding of a crucial political issue and helps to fuel a social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander offers a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status, denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights movement. Challenging the notion that the election of Barack Obama signalled a new era of colourblindness in the United States, The New Jim Crow reveals how racial discrimination was not ended but merely redesigned. By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of colour, the American criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, relegating millions to a permanent second-class status even as it formally adheres to the principle of colourblindness. A searing call to action for everyone concerned with social justice, The New Jim Crow is one of the most important books about race in the 21st century.

Numerous studies indicate that completing a college degree reduces an individual's likelihood of recidivating. However, there is little research available to inform best practices for running college programs inside jails or prisons or supporting returning citizens who want to complete a college degree. Higher Education Accessibility Behind and Beyond Prison Walls examines program development and pedagogical techniques in the area of higher education for students who are currently incarcerated or completing a degree post-incarceration. Drawing on the experiences of program administrators and professors from across the country, it offers best practices for (1) developing, running, and teaching in college programs offered inside jails and prisons and (2) providing adequate support to returning citizens who wish to complete a college degree. This book is intended to be a resource for college administrators, staff, and professors running or teaching in programs inside jails or prisons or supporting returning citizens on traditional college campuses.

The dramatic increase in U.S. prison populations since the 1970s is often blamed on the mandatory sentencing required by "three strikes" laws and other punitive crime bills. Michael O'Hear shows that the blame is actually not so easily assigned. His meticulous analysis of incarceration in Wisconsin-a state where judges have considerable discretion in sentencing-explores the reasons why the prison population has ballooned nearly tenfold over the past forty years. O'Hear tracks the effects of sentencing laws and politics in Wisconsin from the eve of the imprisonment boom in 1970 up to the 2010s. Drawing on archival research, original public-opinion polling, and interviews with dozens of key policymakers, he reveals important dimensions that have been missed by others. He draws out lessons from the Wisconsin experience for the United States as a whole, where mass incarceration has cost taxpayers billions of dollars and caused untold misery to millions of inmates and their families.

According to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) 'Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.' Connecting the politics of abolition to wider emancipatory struggles for liberation and social justice, this book argues that penal abolitionism should be understood as an important public critical pedagogy and philosophy of hope that can help to reinvigorate democracy and set society on a pathway towards living in a world without prisons. For Abolition draws upon the socialist ethics of dignity, empathy, freedom and paradigm of life to systematically critique imprisonment as a state institution characterised by 'social death'.

The untold history of America's mid-twentieth-century program of hepatitis infection research, its scientists' aspirations, and the damage the project caused human subjects "Sydney Halpern has written a compelling, if unsettling, history of hepatitis research during World War II and the Cold War. It will become a must-read for anyone interested in bioethics and medical history."-Susan E. Lederer, author of Subjected to Science and Flesh and Blood From 1942 through 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting to discover the basic features of the disease and the viruses causing it, and to develop interventions that would quell recurring outbreaks. Drawing from extensive archival research and in-person interviews, Sydney Halpern traces the hepatitis program from its origins in World War II through its expansion during the initial Cold War years, to its demise in the early 1970s amid an outcry over research abuse. The subjects in hepatitis studies were members of stigmatized groups-conscientious objectors, prison inmates, the mentally ill, and developmentally disabled adults and children. The book reveals how researchers invoked military and scientific imperatives and the rhetoric of a common good to win support for the experiments and access to recruits. Halpern examines the participants' long-term health consequences and raises troubling questions about hazardous human experiments aimed at controlling today's epidemic diseases.

Immigration, Crime, and the Administration of Justice: Contemporary Readings provides students with a concise, scholarly overview of contemporary immigration issues related to policy, policing, and corrections. The carefully selected readings in this volume provide students with insight into the lived experiences of immigrants in America. The anthology is divided into three distinct units that address issues surrounding how immigration is viewed through the lens of criminal justice statistics, policy, and crime. Unit 1 consists of three empirical studies that explore the perceptions and realities of the relationship between crime and immigration. In Unit 2, readings outline both macro- and micro-level immigration policies and how they intersect with criminal justice. The final section addresses the future of immigration and crime, including readings that explore immigration and civil rights, the politics of belonging, and the future of U.S. immigration policy. Introductions and post-reading questions encourage critical thought and greater engagement with the material. Immigration, Crime, and the Administration of Justice is an ideal supplementary resource for undergraduate and graduate-level courses in criminal justice and administration of justice with focus on immigration.

"The text is an incredible composite of the literature that has shaped correctional practice. The authors have a great capacity for making research interesting and accessible. Cullen and Jonson have accomplished their goal of motivating readers to become sophisticated consumers of correctional knowledge." -Betsy Matthews, Eastern Kentucky University The Second Edition of Correctional Theory: Context and Consequences continues to identify and evaluate the major competing theories used to guide the goals, policies, and practices of the correctional system. Authors Francis T. Cullen and Cheryl Lero Jonson demonstrate that changes in theories can legitimize new ways of treating and punishing offenders, and they help readers understand how transformations in the social and political context of U.S. society impact correctional theory and policy. Designed to motivate readers to become sophisticated consumers of correctional information, the book emphasizes the importance of using evidence-based information to guide decisions, rather than relying on nonscientific commonsense or ideology-based beliefs.

Typical offender risk factors include a history of antisocial behavior, an antisocial personality, antisocial cognition, antisocial associates, family and/or marital problems, school or work problems, leisure or recreation problems, and substance abuse. Though there are roughly 66 risk assessment instruments that measure these factors, only 19 of them are in wide use. Of these tools, micro-level and personal factors are included on typical risk instruments while external or macro-level matters are not. Community Risk and Protective Factors for Probation and Parole Risk Assessment Tools: Emerging Research and Opportunities is an essential research publication that explores tools for predicting recidivism rates among incarcerated individuals. The study provides evidence for an alternative explanation for a still prevailing notion that recidivism is primarily a result of personal/internal failings (such as mental illness or cognitive impairment) versus external/societal ones. Featuring a wide range of topics such as affordable housing, policy reform, and adult education, this book is ideal for criminologists, sociologists, law enforcement, corrections officers, wardens, therapists, rehabilitation counselors, researchers, policymakers, criminal justice professionals, academicians, and students.