When The New Press, the Center for American Progress, and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples and Family Movement issued a call for innovative reform ideas, over three hundred currently and formerly incarcerated individuals responded. What We Know collects two dozen of their best suggestions, each of which proposes a policy solution derived from their own lived experience.
The Reverend Vivian Nixon is executive director of College and Community Fellowship (CCF), a New York-based organization committed to removing barriers to higher education for women with criminal-record histories and their families
Attorney Daryl Atkinson was the inaugural Second Chance Fellow for the U.S. Department of Justice, and is now the co-director of Forward Justice, a law, policy, and strategy center in Durham, North Carolina, dedicated to advancing racial, social, and economic justice in the United States.
Title: What We Know: Solutions from Our Experiences in the Justice System
Author:
ISBN: 9781620975299
Binding:
Publisher: The New Press
Publication Date: 2020-07-23
Number of Pages: 272
Weight: 0.4221 kg
Praise for What We Know:
Uniformly well-written and cogently argued, these essays cast a harsh light on the prison system and the obstacles millions of Americans face in getting their lives back on track. Policy makers, lawyers, and activists should take note.
-Publishers Weekly
This volume features a variety of perspectives and should appeal to advocates of U.S. social reform and those interested in the nation's complex prison history.
-Library Journal
A must-read collection of bold new criminal justice reform ideas from the true experts-those of us with firsthand knowledge of America's harsh and unjust criminal justice system.
-Susan Burton, founder, A New Way of Life Reentry Project, and author of Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women
What We Know demonstrates that solutions to the challenge of mass incarceration are often close at hand; the voices of people affected by the justice system show us the way forward to a public safety strategy that emphasizes dignity over punishment.
-Marc Mauer, executive director, The Sentencing Project, and author of Race to Incarcerate
An exemplary, welcome, and necessary contribution, by turns forceful, specific, personal, inspired, and insightful, delivered by those people most impacted. This should top everyone's reading list.
-Nick Turner, director, Vera Institute of Justice
In What We Know, Nixon and Atkinson have gathered together voices that turn experience into expertise, and they leave us with a challenge: now that we've been told, will we listen?
-Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet, lawyer, and author of Felon
What We Know gives voice to the extraordinary insights and ideas of formerly incarcerated Americans. In so doing, it reminds us of the tragic loss of human potential locked behind our prison walls.
-Neil Barsky, founder and chair, The Marshall Project
[An] eye-opening volume . . . filled with very smart and very wise ideas about reforming the criminal legal system.
-Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
