front cover of This Is Where I Am
This Is Where I Am
A Memoir
Zeke Caligiuri
University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Prison is where Zeke Caligiuri is. Powderhorn Park in South Minneapolis, dubbed “Murderapolis” the year he turned eighteen, is where he comes from. It was the same neighborhood his father grew up in but had changed dramatically by the early 1990s. Yet in Zeke’s family, father and mother and grandmother kept things together while all around them the houses decayed and once-safe streets gave way to the crush of poverty and crime. 

This Is Where I Am is Zeke Caligiuri’s clear-eyed account of how he got from there to here, how a boy who had every hope went from dreaming of freedom to losing it, along with nearly everything and everyone he loved. Tenderhearted in its reflections on his lost childhood, brutally candid in its description of a life of hanging and hustling, Zeke’s memoir recreates a world of tagging and goofing gone awry, of moving from smoking pot to unsuccessful attempts at dealing crack, of watching his father weep at the funeral of a seventeen-year-old boy, of going to jail: first strike. It is a place where, when asked what he's going to do with his life, a friend can only answer: “What the fuck are you talking about?”

This Is Where I Am is Zeke's own answer: he is going to tell his story, every sharp detail and sobering word, with the natural grace of a gifted writer and the hard-won wisdom of hindsight. 

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front cover of Trapped in a Vice
Trapped in a Vice
The Consequences of Confinement for Young People
Cox, Alexandra
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Winner of the 2019 Outstanding Book Award - ASC DCCSJ​

Trapped in a Vice explores the consequences of a juvenile justice system that is aimed at promoting change in the lives of young people, yet ultimately relies upon tools and strategies that enmesh them in a system that they struggle to move beyond. The system, rather than the crimes themselves, is the vice. Trapped in a Vice explores the lives of the young people and adults in the criminal justice system, revealing the ways that they struggle to manage the expectations of that system; these stories from the ground level of the justice system demonstrate the complex exchange of policy and practice.  
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Trial by Treatment
Punishing Illness in an Age of Criminal Legal Reform
Mary Ellen Stitt
University of Chicago Press, 2025

A troubling account of the unexpected impacts of treatment-based alternatives to criminal punishment.

Every year, courts send hundreds of thousands of people to treatment-based programs as alternatives to traditional punishment. These alternatives—known as ‘diversion programs’—are widely celebrated as reforms that reduce the punishment of the mentally ill. But in Trial by Treatment, Mary Ellen Stitt shows that they have, in fact, expanded the reach of the criminal legal system and its power over the lives of the most vulnerable.

The inner workings of diversion programs are obscure, partially by design, and data on outcomes is hard to come by. Stitt draws on two years of fieldwork in criminal courtrooms and court-mandated treatment sessions, as well as an original national dataset, in-depth interviews, and experimental survey data, to document the hidden impacts of diversion. She shows that placing mental healthcare under the control of the courts has helped to legitimize the criminalization of illness, warped treatment environments, and amplified inequalities in punishment. In vivid and humanizing detail, Trial by Treatment shows how reforms that keep power and discretion in the same hands can entrench the very problems they promised to solve.

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front cover of Trial by Treatment
Trial by Treatment
Punishing Illness in an Age of Criminal Legal Reform
Mary Ellen Stitt
University of Chicago Press, 2025

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

A troubling account of the unexpected impacts of treatment-based alternatives to criminal punishment.

Every year, courts send hundreds of thousands of people to treatment-based programs as alternatives to traditional punishment. These alternatives—known as ‘diversion programs’—are widely celebrated as reforms that reduce the punishment of the mentally ill. But in Trial by Treatment, Mary Ellen Stitt shows that they have, in fact, expanded the reach of the criminal legal system and its power over the lives of the most vulnerable.

The inner workings of diversion programs are obscure, partially by design, and data on outcomes is hard to come by. Stitt draws on two years of fieldwork in criminal courtrooms and court-mandated treatment sessions, as well as an original national dataset, in-depth interviews, and experimental survey data, to document the hidden impacts of diversion. She shows that placing mental healthcare under the control of the courts has helped to legitimize the criminalization of illness, warped treatment environments, and amplified inequalities in punishment. In vivid and humanizing detail, Trial by Treatment shows how reforms that keep power and discretion in the same hands can entrench the very problems they promised to solve.

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front cover of Turned Inside Out
Turned Inside Out
Reading the Russian Novel in Prison
Steven Shankman
Northwestern University Press, 2017
In Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison, Steven Shankman reflects on his remarkable experience teaching texts by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vasily Grossman, and Emmanuel Levinas in prison to a mix of university students and inmates. These persecuted writers—Shankman argues that Dostoevsky’s and Levinas’s experiences of incarceration were formative—describe ethical obligation as an experience of being turned inside out by the face-to-face encounter. Shankman relates this experience of being turned inside out to the very significance of the word “God,” to Dostoevsky’s tormented struggles with religious faith, to Vasily Grossman’s understanding of his Jewishness in his great novel Life and Fate, and to the interpersonal encounters the author has witnessed reading these texts with his students in the prison environment.
 
Turned Inside Out will appeal to readers with interests in the classic novels of Russian literature, in prisons and pedagogy, or in Levinas and phenomenology. At a time when the humanities are struggling to justify the centrality of their mission in today’s colleges and universities, Steven Shankman by example makes an undeniably powerful case for the transformative power of reading great texts.
 
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