Selected letters from Incarcerated Persons requesting books from Books to Prisoners, a Prison Book Program.

For Dear Life chronicles feminist and artist Carol Jacobsen's deep commitment to the causes of justice and human rights, and focuses a critical lens on an American criminal-legal regime that imparts racist, gendered, and classist modes of punishment to women lawbreakers. Jacobsen's tireless work with and for women prisoners is charted in this rich assemblage of images and texts that reveal the collective strategies she and the prisoners have employed to receive justice. The book gives evidence that women's lawbreaking is often an effort to survive gender-based violence. The faces, letters, and testimonies of dozens of incarcerated women with whom Jacobsen has worked present a visceral yet politicized chorus of voices against the criminal-legal systems that fail us all. Their voices are joined by those of leading feminist scholars in essays that illuminate the arduous methods of dissent that Jacobsen and the others have employed to win freedom for more than a dozen women sentenced to life imprisonment, and to free many more from torturous prison conditions. The book is a document to Jacobsen's love and lifelong commitment to creating feminist justice and freedom, and to the efficacy of her artistic, legal, and extralegal political actions on behalf of women.

Bo Lozoff is the director of Human Kindness Foundation and its internationally acclaimed Prison-Ashram Project. His writings, workshops, and tapes have helped countless people transform their lives into sacred practice even in some of our worst prisons -- prisons of selfishness, fear, anger, and addiction as well as bars and steel.

The heart-wrenching story of one girl's experience at a Ukrainian internment camp in Quebec during World War I Anya's family emigrates from the Ukraine hoping for a fresh start and a new life in Canada. Soon after they cram into a tiny apartment in Montreal, WWI is declared. Because their district was annexed by Austria -- now at war with the Commonwealth -- many Ukrainians in Canada are declared "enemy aliens" and sent to internment camps. Anya and her family are shipped off to the Spirit Lake Camp, in the remote wilderness of Quebec. Though conditions are brutal, at least Anya is at a camp that houses entire families together, and even in this barbed-wire world, she is able to make new friends and bring some happiness to the people around her. Author Marsha Skrypuch, whose own grandfather was interned during WWI at a camp in Alberta, travelled to Spirit Lake during her research for the book. "When we got to the cemetery, I was overwhelmed with emotion. Imagine seeing a series of crosses, all grown over with brush and abandoned, and knowing that the real person you based a character on had a little sister buried there? That real little girl was Mary Manko. She was only six years old when she and her family were taken from their Montreal home and sent to Spirit Lake Internment Camp. Her two-year-old sister Carolka died at the camp. Mary Manko is in her nineties now and is the last known survivor of the Ukrainian internment operations." explains Skrypuch.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

What happens to a successful woman when her world falls apart and she is faced with betrayal, breast cancer, and prison? What happens when her pain Is unimaginable and her choices look bleak. When all this happened to Sue Ellen Allen, she chose to turn her pain into power. The death of Gina, her young roommate, coupled with an atmosphere of darkness and negativity, led her to find her passion and purpose behind the bars. Her experience of cancer, prison, and Gina s death is an inspirational story of courage, wisdom, and choices.

The magnificent second novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment. “Accomplished . . . mature and assured. . . . A major American novelist.”— New Republic Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson, Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and given his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that’s in it. A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner’s Dilemma is a story of the power of individual experience.

Maryam Rafiee was only a teenager when her father, Hossein Rafiee, was first imprisoned in Iran for expressing his political views. Unable to see or speak to him, she wrote him letters that she could never send. She recorded the things she wished she could tell him: thoughts on school, home, the family's struggle to free him, and—most importantly—her own hopes and dreams. Fifteen years later, in the wake of her father's second imprisonment, Maryam offers these letters to the world, to reveal the suffering undergone by prisoners of conscience and their families. Her story is one of hope, courage, and love in the face of tyranny.