Still Doing Life - 22 Lifers, 25 Years Later

Author's sales track: The Little Book of Restorative Justice has sold over 170,000 copies and been translated into 11 languages. Changing Lenses has been published in 7 languages and reissued several times; the latest edition (2015) continues to sell 1000 copies per year.

Author's reputation in the field: Zehr is known as "the grandfather of restorative justice" and is beloved by everyone working on criminal justice reform (he was introduced to us by Marc Mauer).

The New Press track in field: TNP criminal justice books routinely sell over 10,000 copies, such as Understanding Mass Incarceration (10k in all editions), Chokehold (24K in all editions), and Until We Reckon (15K in all editions).

Traveling exhibit: The authors are in the process of setting up a traveling exhibit from the photos and text.

Success of the Genre: There is a steady market for this kind of longitudinal study, and good ones are extremely rare; excellent, classic examples include Milton Rogovin's Triptychs: Buffalo Revisited, Dale Maharidge's Pulitzer Prize-winning And Their Children After Them, the 7-Up series film series, and Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters. This book will also have some of the appeal of books like Material World, which make a sociological statement through photography.

Timely Topic: In 2019, over 200,000 people were serving life or virtual life sentences-50,000 of whom have no chance of parole.

About the author

Howard Zehr is a distinguished professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. He is the author of the bestselling The Little Book of Restorative Justice and Doing Life, among other titles.

Barb Toews is associate professor of criminal justice at University of Washington, Tacoma. She is author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice for People in Prison and co-author, with Howard Zehr, of Critical Issues in Restorative Justice. She is the editor of the Little Books in Restorative Justice series and lives in Tacoma, Washington.

Summary

Side-by-side, time-lapse photos and interviews, separated by twenty-five years, of people serving life sentences in prison, by the bestselling author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice

“Shows the remarkable resilience of people sentenced to die in prison and raises profound questions about a system of punishment that has no means of recognizing the potential of people to change.” —Marc Mauer, senior adviser, The Sentencing Project, and co-author (with Ashley Nellis) of The Meaning of Life

“Life without parole is a death sentence without an execution date.” —Aaron Fox (lifer) from Still Doing Life

In 1996, Howard Zehr, a restorative justice activist and photographer, published Doing Life, a book of photo portraits of individuals serving life sentences without the possibility of parole in Pennsylvania prisons. Twenty-five years later, Zehr revisited many of the same individuals and photographed them in the same poses. In Still Doing Life, Zehr and co-author Barb Toews present the two photos of each individual side by side, along with interviews conducted at the two different photo sessions, creating a deeply moving of people who, for the past quarter century, have been trying to live meaningful lives while facing the likelihood that they will never be free.

In the tradition of other compelling photo books including Milton Rogovin’s Triptychs and Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, Still Doing Life offers a riveting longitudinal look at a group of people over an extended period of time—in this case with complex and problematic implications for the American criminal justice system. Each night in the United States, more than 200,000 men and women incarcerated in state and federal prisons will go to sleep facing the reality that they may die without ever returning home. There could be no more compelling book to challenge readers to think seriously about the consequences of life sentences.

Additional text

Praise for Still Doing Life:
“As our country reckons with the devastating consequence of mass incarceration—the broken lives, families, and communities that result—this moving collection couldn’t be more timely.”
—Chesa Boudin, San Francisco district attorney

“A rare, compassionate, and bracing view into the personal meaning of life sentences for the people serving them. Few books have a temporal range that even begins to approach the length of the sentences they speak about. Still Doing Life invites us to consider deeply and differently the effect of long sentences and, I hope, to imagine what else might be possible.”
—Danielle Sered, executive director of Common Justice and author of Until We Reckon

“Important and powerful. The U.S. calls itself a country of second chances, but too many individuals, mostly Black and Brown, are locked away for life and left to rot. A must-read for anyone interested in ending mass incarceration.”
—Marilyn Mosby, state’s attorney for Baltimore, Maryland

“Moving beyond words. These photos and interviews confront our utter societal failure with the triumph of the human spirit, and call out to our shared humanity: When will the U.S. join the international community in respecting the ‘right to hope’ that would eradicate such life sentences?”
—Bernard E. Harcourt, Isidor and Sevill Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia University, and author of Critique & Praxis

“A poignant look at the humanity behind the more than 200,000 individuals imprisoned for life, which should inspire us all to reform a sentencing landscape that has left our nation second to none in our rate and length of incarceration.”
—Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution

Product details

• Authors: Barb Toews, Howard Zehr, Howard Toews Zehr
• Publisher: New press usa
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 15.03.2022
• EAN: 9781620976487
• ISBN: 978-1-62097-648-7
• No. of pages: 176
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Law > International law, foreign law; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Penology, PHOTOGRAPHY / Photojournalism, LAW / Criminal Law / Sentencing