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...

Tells the history of the Bosket family and how the pattern of violence that has followed them for generations had its roots in the rural South in slavery days. Focuses on Butch, the only person to earn a Ph.D. in prison, and his son, Willie, a murderer with a genius level IQ.

An investigative reporter tells the story of a wrongfully accused black sharecropper who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he did not commit, shedding an informative light on America's past and future, as well as its present.

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.

A narrative of injustice, exoneration, and the lifelong impact of incarceration, sheds important light on the failures of the American justice system at every level. In June 1985, a young Black man in Winston-Salem, N.C. named Darryl Hunt was falsely convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of a white copyeditor at the local paper. Many in the community believed him innocent and crusaded for his release even as subsequent...

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,...

Challenges one of America's most cherished assumptions, the belief that slavery in the US ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, by telling the harrowing story of how, in the South, a new system of involuntary servitude took its place with shocking force. Challenges one of America's most cherished assumptions, the belief that slavery in the United States ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, by telling the harrowing...