Books About Criminal Justice Reform

A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice — from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time.

Philadelphia’s progressive district attorney offers an inspiring vision of how people can take back power to reform criminal justice, based on lessons from a life’s work as an advocate for the accused.

A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: In one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country’s history. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.

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. Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for “decarceration,” and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Blood in the Water is the definitive history of the infamous 1971 Attica Prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims’ decades-long quest for justice.

This groundbreaking historical exposé unearths the lost stories of enslaved persons and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter in “The Age of Neoslavery.”

A renowned journalist and legal commentator exposes the unchecked power of the prosecutor as a driving force in America’s mass incarceration crisis — and charts a way out.

A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation’s most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars.

A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd’s life and legacy — from his family’s roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing — telling the story of how one man’s tragic experience brought about a global movement for change.

Universally acclaimed, rapturously reviewed, and an instant New York Times bestseller, Chanel Miller’s breathtaking memoir “gives readers the privilege of knowing her not just as Emily Doe, but as Chanel Miller the writer, the artist, the survivor, the fighter” (The Wrap). Her story of trauma and transcendence illuminates a culture biased to protect perpetrators, indicting a criminal justice system designed to fail the most vulnerable, and, ultimately, shining with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life.

Courtroom 302 is the fascinating story of one year in Chicago’s Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country. Here we see the system through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge’s chambers, the spectators’ gallery. From the daily grind of the court to the highest-profile case of the year, Steve Bogira’s masterful investigation raises fundamental issues of race, civil rights, and justice in America.

Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder — a “ghettoside” killing, one young black man slaying another — and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities — and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.

The classic bestseller from a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist that tells the compelling true story of one man’s fight for the right to legal counsel for every defendant.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, the untold story of their investigation of Harvey Weinstein and its consequences for the #MeToo movement.

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.

Legendary criminal defense attorney Clive Stafford Smith has devoted his career to helping save penniless defendants from a justice system whose goal is not so much to find the right man as to get a conviction. An Atlantic Book of the Year and finalist for the Orwell Prize: A riveting true crime tale from the attorney who inspired John Grisham’s The Chamber.

For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: His mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Haunted by the landscape of his youth, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. Posted to remote regions crisscrossed by drug routes and smuggling corridors, he learns to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Cantú tries not to think where the stories go from there. Searing and unforgettable, The Line Becomes a River goes behind the headlines, making urgent and personal the violence our border wreaks on both sides of the line.

An “extraordinary, unforgettable” (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow) memoir of redemption and second chances amidst America’s mass incarceration epidemic. In equal turns, Writing My Wrongs is a page-turning portrait of a life in the shadow of poverty, violence, and fear; a compelling witness to our country’s need for rethinking its approach to crime, prison, and the men and women sent there.

Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists tell the riveting true crime story of a teenager charged with lying about having been raped — and the detectives who followed a winding path to arrive at the truth.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation’s ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.