Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle...

Alexander offers an indictment of the criminal justice system, arguing that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education, and public benefits create a permanent under caste based largely on race. Includes a new preface for the tenth-anniversary edition discussing the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

"James Comey, former FBI Director and New York Times bestselling author of A Higher Loyalty, uses his long career in federal law enforcement to explore issues of justice and fairness in the US justice system. James Comey might best be known as the FBI director that Donald Trump fired in 2017, but he's had a long, varied career in the law and justice system. He knows better than most just what a force for good the US justice system can be, and how...

America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, yet nearly every empirical measure -- wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation -- reveals that racial inequality has barely improved since 1968, when Richard Nixon became our first "law and order" president. MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes upends our national conversation on policing and democracy in a book of wide-ranging historical, social, and political analysis. Hayes contends...

"From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in "expert witnesses" and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three...

"Carving Out a Humanity gathers some of our country's brightest progressive legal stars in a volume that illuminates the facets of the law that have continued to perpetuate racial inequality and to confound our nation at the start of a new millennium. Originally delivered as Derrick Bell Lectures in a series at NYU School of Law, begun in 1995 and running up through 2019, Carving Out a Humanity offers an unprecedented array of today's most creative...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of "The Price of Loyalty" and "The One Percent Doctrine" returns with an election year account of the looming national security crisis that America faces right now.

"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 in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony...

"An original and consequential argument about race, crime, and the law Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics -- and their impact on people of color -- are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic...