Benbrook Public Library

In this gripping new non-fiction novel from Catherine Marfino-Reiker, author of 999 Officer Down, a veteran police officer is driven to the brink of mental collapse. J U S T O N E S H I F T delves deep into the mind of a big city street cop as he confronts one impossible situation after another during the busiest shift of his career. An intense recounting, which discloses the officers thought process as he makes repetitive, split-second, life and...

In seven chapters, readers will learn the history of the penal system, a weapon against the black population's growth for over 100 years. As it has remain a unique correlation with the institution of slavery from an historical context. The long fought battles that got industries in prisons, forced out but later to return only to thrive and change the entire system into a billion dollar business. The socialization process, and the brutality that under-develops...

Rikers Island--just six miles from the Empire State Building--is one of the largest, most complex and most expensive penal institutions in the world, yet most New Yorkers couldn't find it on a map. Jennifer Wynn, the director of the Fresh Start program at Rikers, takes readers into the jails and then back out-to the communities where her students were born and raised. She chronicles their journeys as they struggle to "go straight" and find respect...

A groundbreaking work of reportage on the hidden consequences of America's prison boom Life On the Outside tells the story of Elaine Bartlett, who spent sixteen-years in Bedford Hills prison for selling cocaine- a first offense under New York's harsh Rockefeller drug laws. The book opens on the morning of January 26, 2000, when she is set free, having received clemency from the governor. At forty-two, Elaine has virtually nothing: no money, no...

A single mother with no salary and few possessions, she devotes her life to helping others, visiting prisoners who have nobody else to turn to. Susan Aldous was on a path to self-destruction when she decided to give her life to others instead of wasting it away in Melbourne's dark underbelly. Working as a Playboy bunny girl, an admirer sponsored her to travel abroad for charity. She left a world of drugs and petty crime behind and moved to Singapore,...

Chavoret Jaruboon was personally responsible for executing 55 prison inmates in Thailand's infamous prisons. As a boy, he wanted to be a teacher like his father, but his life changed when he chose one of the hardest jobs in the world. Honest and often disturbing – but told with surprising humour and emotion – The Last Executioner is the remarkable story of a man who chose death as his vocation. The Last Executioner is not for the faint hearted....

"Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true," wrote Victor Serge in the epigraph to Men in Prison. "I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience." The author of Men in Prison served five years in French penitentiaries (1912-1917) for the crime of "criminal association"-in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous "Tragic...

Life Sentences is a collection of writing by six incarcerated men, a hybrid of prison memoir, philosophy, history, policy document, and manifesto. It is also a how-to guide for those who are trapped inside our own community, uninclined or unable to form loving connections with those around us, ashamed perhaps of the harm we have done them and not knowing any way forward. Mainly, though, this book is a letter of invitation, asking readers to join with...

On 15 March 1817 the convict ship the Chapman departed from the Cork with 200 male convicts on board. When it dropped anchor off Sydney Cove on four months later its decks were blood-soaked. The prison doors opened to reveal 160 gaunt and brutalized men. Twelve were dead and twenty-eight lay wounded in the ships' hospital. Using daily journals from the crew, detailed testimony from several convict and official colonial government correspondence, this...

'An insightful and gripping account that will take you into the dark but fascinating world of a Victorian executioner.' – Stewart P. Evans Between 1884 and 1905 James Billington and his three sons, Thomas, William and John, were responsible for 235 executions in Victorian Great Britain and Ireland. They hanged many notorious murderers, but equally fascinating is the story of the family. Did James really feel he served society and justice, or did...