Penology

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....

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....

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.

In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners.

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....

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....

Breathing Fire is a dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires for less than a dollar an hour....

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....

In the year 1800, it was estimated that over 200 offenses were punishable by death in England. The reason was that the police were as well-organized as now, and the uncertainty of both the detection of crime and the conviction of offenders was compensated for....

A groundbreaking, haunting, and profoundly moving history of modernity's greatest tragedy: concentration camps....

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....

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....

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

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

In 1945 seven of Hitler's henchmen were incarcerated as solitary inmates of the vast Spandau prison in Berlin originally built to accommodate hundreds. Every conceivable precaution was taken to ensure escape was impossible for such high-profile prisoners.

Each day we saw the outside world in all its splendour, and each day that view served as a reminder that we had wasted and ruined our lives....

In 1983, Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, both serving life sentences at the U.S. Prison in Marion, Illinois, separately murdered two correction officers on the same day. The Bureau of Prisons condemned both men to the severest punishment that could legally be imposed....

The United States, alone, locks up a quarter of the world’s incarcerated people. And yet apart from clichés—paying a debt to society; you do the crime, you do the time—there is little sense collectively in America what constitutes retribution or atonement. We don’t actually know why we punish....

How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration....

Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing....

How can we be proud of a system of justice that often pressures the innocent to plead guilty? Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on white-collar crime, explores this and other puzzles in a startling account of our broken legal system....

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.

An illuminating view of prison life, as told by currently and formerly incarcerated people, from the co-creators and co-hosts of the Peabody- and Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle....

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