A master class in social change—how a coalition of parents, activists, and prison officials brought a racist and destructive institution to its knees“Nell Bernstein’s book could be for juvenile justice what Rachel Carson’s book was for the environmental movement.” —Andrew Cohen, correspondent, ABC News, about Bernstein’s Burning Down the HouseOver the past twenty years, one state after another has shuttered its you...

The nationally acclaimed “engrossing, disturbing, at times heartbreaking” (Van Jones) book that shines a harsh light on the abusive world of juvenile prisons, by the award-winning journalist“Nell Bernstein’s book could be for juvenile justice what Rachel Carson’s book was for the environmental movement.” —Andrew Cohen, correspondent, ABC NewsWhen teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Brian got into...

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. "An urgent invitation to care for all children as our own." —Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random FamilyIn this "moving condemnation of the U.S. penal system and its effect on families", award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein takes an intimate look at parents and children—over two million of them—torn apart by our current incarceration policy ( Parents' Pr...

The nationally acclaimed "engrossing, disturbing, at times heartbreaking" (Van Jones) book that shines a harsh light on the abusive world of juvenile prisons, by the award-winning journalist"Nell Bernstein's book could be for juvenile justice what Rachel Carson's book was for the environmental movement." —Andrew Cohen, correspondent, ABC NewsWhen teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Brian got into i...

One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about what motivates young people to change. Nell Bernstein eloquently argues that there is no right way to lock up a child. The very act of isolation denies children the thing that is most essential to their growth and rehabilitation: positive relationships with caring adults.Bernstein introduces us to you...

One in ten American children has a parent under criminal justice supervision—incarcerated, on probation, or on parole. One in thirty-three American children—and one in eight African American children—goes to sleep without access to a parent because that parent is in jail. Despite these staggering numbers, the children of prisoners remain largely invisible to society.Following in the tradition of the bestseller Random Family, journalist Nell Bernstein shows, through the dee...

An award-winning scholar and author of Killing the Black Body exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system“A brilliant and impassioned call for abolition.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim CrowMany believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and soc...

An urgent exposéf the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisonsAmerica has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America's jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders.In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the crim...

More and more women—mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars.Oddly, there's been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why? The answers are in Women Behind Bars, in which investigative journalist Silja Talvi sheds light on why American girls a...

The public health expert and prison reform activist offers "meticulous analysis" on our criminal justice system and the plague of American incarceration ( The Washington Post).An internationally recognized public health scholar, Ernest Drucker uses the tools of epidemiology to demonstrate that incarceration in the United States has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic. He argues that imprisonment, originally conceived as a response to the crim...

**A brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America: the day-to-day brutalities, largely hidden from public view, endured by Black youth growing up under constant police surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse"Storytelling that can make people understand the racial inequities of the legal system, and...restore the humanity this system has cruelly stripped from its victims.” —New York Times Book Review**Drawing ...

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment – an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, society’s purposes of imprisonment, and offenders’ reformability. Through the...