“Laugh! Cry! G-A-S-P!" This heart-wrenching and triumphant love story is a tale of advocacy and caregiving. Donna's husband, David, stumbled into their bedroom, his hand covering a blood-filled eye from a brain hemorrhage. Donna called 9-1-1. David slipped into a coma. At that moment, Donna was thrust onto the path of caregiver for her best friend and the love of her life. In her debut memoir, Donna shares how a neurosurgeon said that David would make a "great organ donor." She writes of arrogant doctors, uncaring visitors, insensitive ambulance drivers, and problematic nurses. She also tells of the many compassionate doctors, nurses, therapists, staff, strangers, family members, and friends who helped them on their journey. Donna compellingly describes her ability to appear positive as she experiences the horror of making life-or-death decisions. As her world crashes, she credits laughter as her lifesaver. More than thirteen years later, Donna and David are living a "new normal" together.

Incarcerated bodies, liberated minds: a narrative of literacy education behind bars. Words No Bars Can Hold provides a rare glimpse into literacy learning under the most dehumanizing conditions. Deborah Appleman chronicles her work teaching college- level classes at a high- security prison for men, most of whom are serving life sentences. Through narrative, poetry, memoir, and fiction, the students in Appleman’s classes attempt to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories. The students’ work, through which they probe and develop their identities as readers and writers, illuminates the transformative power of literacy. Appleman argues for the importance of educating the incarcerated, and explores ways to interrupt the increasingly common journey from urban schools to our nation’s prisons. From the sobering endpoint of what scholars have called the “school to prison pipeline,” she draws insight from the narratives and experiences of those who have traveled it.

Provides a close-up examination of the instability and uncertainty that plague the children of prisoners, in a collection of personal, anecdotal accounts that chronicle their attempts to cope with the unique challenges in their lives.

An essential resource for former convicts and their families post-incarceration. The United States has the largest criminal justice system in the world, with currently over 7 million adults and juveniles in jail, prison, or community custody. Because they spend enough time in prison to disrupt their connections to their families and their communities, they are not prepared for the difficult and often life-threatening process of reentry. As a result, the percentage of these people who return to a life of crime and additional prison time escalates each year. Beyond Bars is the most current, practical, and comprehensive guide for ex-convicts and their families about managing a successful reentry into the community and includes: • Tips on how to prepare for release while still in prison • Ways to deal with family members, especially spouses and children • Finding a job • Money issues such as budgets, bank accounts, taxes, and debt • Avoiding drugs and other illicit activities • Free resources to rely on for support

Public Health Behind Bars From Prisons to Communities examines the burden of illness in the growing prison population, and analyzes the impact on public health as prisoners are released. This book makes a timely case for correctional health care that is humane for those incarcerated and beneficial to the communities they reenter.

A piercing portrait of the injustices of the Indian prison system. For decades, the narratives around prisoners in India have perpetuated arbitrary notions of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizen. Stories about Indian prisons rarely make it to public notice – from deplorable living conditions, lack of medical care and legal support to intense mistreatment, violence and all manner of horrific abuse. Despite the mounting evidence, any attempts to study the systemic frailties and chilling injustices that abound within a prison complex have been few and far between. In Hope Behind Bars, editors Sanjoy Hazarika and Madhurima Dhanuka draw upon extensive research, identifying prisoners and ex-prisoners, their families and associates and gathering first-person experiences about the Indian prison system. With ten essays contributed by subject specialists, including a former Supreme Court judge, lawyers, inmates, prison officials and activists, on a range of issues, such as the rights of prisoners, the journey to justice in the controversial Hashimpura killings case and life in a detention centre, this essential collection brings prisoners’ lives and liberties to the heart of public debate and policies, presenting accounts of how hope can flower in the most unlikely places. Searing and thought-provoking, it provides the reader with valuable insight into the vexed idea of incarceration and delivers a necessary human document of the true face of justice behind bars in our country

A deeply stirring account of one woman's experience teaching drama to women in prison. I began to understand that female prisoners are not "damaged goods" and to recognize that most of these women had toughed it out in a society that favors others-- by gender, class, or race. They are Desdemonas suffering because of jealous men, Lady Macbeths craving the power of their spouses, Portias disguised as men in order to get ahead, and Shylocks who, being betrayed, take the law into their own hands. So writes Jean Trounstine in Shakespeare Behind Bars. In this gripping account, Trounstine, who spent ten years teaching at Framingham Women's Prison in Massachusetts, focuses on six inmates who, each in her own way, discover in the power of great drama a way to transcend the painful constraints of incarceration. We meet: * Dolly, a fiftyish grandmother who brings her knitting to classes and starts a battered-women's group in prison *Bertie, a Jamaican beauty estranged from her homeland, torn with guilt, and shunned for her crime * Kit, a tough, wisecracking con who stirs up trouble whenever she can-- until she's threatened with losing her kids * Rose, an outsider in the prison community who lives with HIV and eventually gains acceptance through drama * Rhonda, a college-educated leader whose life falls apart when her father dies and who struggles in prison to reestablish her roots * Mamie, a nurse in the free world, now the prison gardener who makes cards with poetry and dried flowers and battles her own illness behind bars Shakespeare Behind Bars is a uniquely powerful work that gives voice to forgotten women, sheds a compassionate light on a dark world, and proves the redemptive power of art and education.

Many people think prisons are all the same-rows of cells filled with violent men who officials rule with an iron fist. Yet, life behind bars varies in incredible ways. In some facilities, prison officials govern with care and attention to prisoners' needs. In others, officials have remarkably little influence on the everyday life of prisoners, sometimes not even providing necessities like food and clean water. Why does prison social order around the world look so remarkably different? In The Puzzle of Prison Order, David Skarbek develops a theory of why prisons and prison life vary so much. He finds that how they're governed-sometimes by the state, and sometimes by the prisoners-matters the most. He investigates life in a wide array of prisons-in Brazil, Bolivia, Norway, a prisoner of war camp, England and Wales, women's prisons in California, and a gay and transgender housing unit in the Los Angeles County Jail-to understand the hierarchy of life on the inside. Drawing on economics and a vast empirical literature on legal systems, Skarbek offers a framework to not only understand why life on the inside varies in such fascinating and novel ways, but also how social order evolves and takes root behind bars.

From a federal inmate with two decades of continuous confinement comes a controversial expose of the shocking details of life in American prisons