Criminal Justice System

From an award-winning journalist, a searing exposé of the effects of the mass incarceration crisis on families -- including the 2.7 million American children who have a parent locked up. In The Shadow System, award-winning journalist Sylvia A. Harvey follows the fears, challenges, and small...

An unforgettable and unpredictable debut novel of guilt, punishment, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive Noa P. Singleton never spoke a word in her own defense throughout a brief trial that ended with a jury finding her guilty of first-degree murder. Ten years later...

Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Tanenbaum ratchets up the suspense with an authentic and morally complex mystery set deep inside the New York City police department. When a black man is shot multiple times in the back on the streets of New York by an NYPD golden boy, chaos...

From New York Times bestselling author and former top prosecutor Linda Fairstein comes an electrifying thriller rich with the riveting behind-the-scenes authenticity that only she can offer. Manhattan Assistant D.A. Alexandra Cooper is working feverishly on a tough trial, seeking justice for...

New York Times bestselling author Robert. K. Tanenbaum delivers his grittiest, most ethically challenging thriller yet, as New York chief assistant district attorney Butch Karp fights for his family in the wilds of West Virginia's coal mining country. While New York City sizzles beneath a...

When a black man is shot multiple times in the back on the streets of New York by an NYPD golden boy, chaos erupts throughout the city. And in an election year no one feels the pressure more than the men and women who vow to protect and to serve. For Butch Karp -- Chief Assistant District...

From New York Times bestselling author and former top prosecutor Linda Fairstein comes an electrifying thriller rich with the riveting behind-the-scenes authenticity that only she can offer. It’s going to be a tough trial. Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper’s case, involving an...

Tanenbaum's done it again: Resolved is a complex, suspenseful tale of justice in the Big Apple, as a vengeful and sadistic killer sets his sights on the man who put him away -- New York Chief Assistant District Attorney Butch Karp. The fifteenth installment in Robert K. Tanenbaum's blistering...

From award-winning sociologist Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve comes the first account of mass wrongful conviction in America, indicting a system purposefully designed to ensnare Black youth in order to close cases Wrongful convictions have long been dismissed as rare exceptions to an otherwise...

How states are making their legal systems more equitable, seen through the story of a Black man falsely imprisoned for thirty years for murder. In 1987, Ben Spencer, a twenty-two-year-old Black man from Dallas, was convicted of murdering white businessman Jeffrey Young—a crime he didn’t...

Courtroom 302 is the fascinating story of one year in Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country. Here we see the system through the eyes of the men and women who experience it, not only in the courtroom but in the lockup, the jury room, the judge's chambers, the spectators' gallery. From the daily grind of the court to the highest-profile case of the year, Steve Bogira's masterful investigation raises fundamental issues of race, civil rights, and justice in America.

How can we be proud of a system of justice that often pressures the innocent to plead guilty? How can we claim that justice is equal when we imprison thousands of poor Black men for relatively modest crimes but rarely prosecute rich white executives who commit crimes having far greater impact? Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on white-collar crime, explores these and other puzzles in Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, a startling account of our broken legal system.

A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive...

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR and THE WASHINGTON POST "Compelling, insightful and important, Beneath a Ruthless Sun exposes the corruption of racial bigotry and animus that shadows a community, a state and a nation. A fascinating examination of an injustice story all too familiar and...