Washoe County Library System

A current death-row inmate relates the story of his life--including heroin-addict parents, an abusive foster family, a life of crime and imprisonment, and his eventual embracing of Buddhism. "When I think about the fact that society, a nation, has sentenced me to death, all I can do is turn inside myself, to the place in my heart that wants so desperately to feel human, still connected to this world, as if I have a purpose." The moving memoir of...

"One of the most prominent voices of her generation debuts with an extraordinarily powerful memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the ever looming absence of her incarcerated father and the path we must take to both honor and overcome our origins. For as long as she could remember, Ashley has put her father on a pedestal. Despite having only vague memories of seeing him face-to-face, she believes he's the only person in the entire world who...

From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. The story that I thought was my life didn't start on the day I was born. Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a...

The program director of #BeyondPrisons shares how her abuse-marked childhood complicated her pursuit of healthy relationships before falling in love with then-inmate Shaka Senghor, the author of the memoir, "Writing My Wrongs."

The story of a young couple in love and their struggle to maintain a relationship while the young man is incarcerated for a horrendous crime. In their letters beginning in 1990, Natasha and Antonio look back at their courtship against the landscape of their beloved Harlem.

"... reconstruction of the ... life of a wrongfully convicted man whose story becomes an historic portrait of the Jim Crow South"--

For over 40 years, the War on Drugs has accounted for more than 45 million arrests, made America the world's largest jailer, and damaged poor communities. Yet for all that, drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available today than ever before. Filmed in more than 20 states, it captures heart-wrenching stories from individuals at all levels--from the dealer to grieving mother to the narcotics officer to the senator to the inmate to the federal judge--revealing...

"The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a rare and original autobiography, a first-person account of a young black man's life as an indentured servant, a juvenile delinquent, and a prisoner in New York State in the mid-nineteenth century. Austin Reed was born a free man near Rochester, NY in the 1820s. As a young adult, he was sent to a juvenile reform school in Manhattan, where he learned to read and write. In the decades that followed,...

"The New York Times bestselling author of Writing My Wrongs invites men everywhere on a journey of honesty and healing through this book of moving letters to his sons-one whom he is raising and the other whose childhood took place during Senghor's nineteen-year incarceration. Shaka Senghor has lived the life of two fathers. With his first son, Jay, born shortly after Senghor was incarcerated for second-degree murder, he experienced the regret of his...