Catalog Search Results
1) Dear Justyce
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English
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Description
Incarcerated teen Quan Banks writes letters to Justyce McCallister, with whom he bonded years before over family issues, about his experiences in the American juvenile justice system.
"Vernell LaQuan Banks and Justyce McAllister grew up a block apart in the Southwest Atlanta neighborhood of Wynwood Heights. Shortly after teenager Quan enters a not guilty plea for the shooting death of a police officer, he is placed in a holding cell to await trial....
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African American History
Black Authors to Know @ DGPL
CRPL Celebrates Black Authors - Nonfiction
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Black Authors to Know @ DGPL
CRPL Celebrates Black Authors - Nonfiction
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Description
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New...
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English
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2023 Best Adult Fiction & Nonfiction (SCPL)
2023 National Book Award Finalists
2024 Tournament of Books
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2023 National Book Award Finalists
2024 Tournament of Books
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Description
"The explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black, about two top women gladiators fighting for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising...
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The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson' is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn't commit, and the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. The book also tells the story of Homer Chase, a former World War II paratrooper and New England...
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English
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Kimonti Carter is serving life without parole in a Washington state prison based on a harsh 1990s three-strikes law, but rather than accept this condemnation, he has worked to transform inmates' lives through education. His experience brilliantly elucidates the dehumanization and trauma that accompany incarceration, but also demonstrates the possibility of redemption even among those society has called irredeemable. Gilda Sheppard's profound and revealing...
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A ground-breaking, personal exploration of America's obsession with continuing human bondage from the editor of the New York Times-bestselling Barracoon. Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American's personal sovereignty. And yet, millions...
8) Upstate
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English
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The story of a young couple in love and their struggle to maintain a relationship while the young man is incarcerated for a horrendous crime. In their letters beginning in 1990, Natasha and Antonio look back at their courtship against the landscape of their beloved Harlem.
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"A compelling, important addition to Hill Harper's bestselling series, inspired by the numerous young inmates who write to him seeking guidance. After the publication of the bestselling Letters to a Young Brother, accomplished actor and speaker Hill Harper began to receive an increasing number of moving letters from inmates who yearned for a connection with a successful role model. With disturbing statistics on African-American incarceration on his...
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"The wrenching, and inspiring, story of a fourteen-year-old sentenced to life in prison, of the extraordinary relationship that developed between him and the woman he shot, and of his release after twenty-six years of imprisonment through the efforts of America's greatest contemporary legal activist, Bryan Stevenson. Here is the story of a poor black kid from the toughest neighborhood of Tampa, Florida, who at age eleven began "jacking" (stealing)...
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Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary, unforgettable” (Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow) memoir of redemption and second chances amidst America’s mass incarceration epidemic, from a member of Oprah’s SuperSoul 100
Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle-class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural...
Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle-class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural...
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English
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In May 1985, Darryl Hunt, a Black teenager in Winston-Salem, N.C. was falsely convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of a young white copyeditor at the local paper. In 2003, an award-winning series of articles led to the DNA evidence that exonerated Hunt. Part true crime drama, part chronicle of a remarkable life cut short by systemic prejudice, this book powerfully illuminates the sustained catastrophe faced by an innocent...
14) Becoming Tara
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English
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With a professional booster for a mother and a pimp for a father, crime was the family business, and Tara held a degree in "Hustling 101." Her street smarts and her love affair with Julio, however, weren't enough to keep her out of prison, and now that she's inside the institution, each day is a new adventure for Tara. She hits the gate kicking her credentials and calling in favors, and before long, she's back in charge and running things. But what...
15) Slavery by another name: the re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
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English
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Description
A sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. From the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these "debts, " prisoners were sold...
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A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story...
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"The child of an incarcerated father, Antong Lucky grew up in an impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhood in East Dallas, Texas, born at the same time as East Dallas experienced an alarming rise in crack cocaine and heroin use. Despite his high grades and strong love for learning, Antong is introduced to gang life and its consequences when confronted by law enforcement. Antong eventually forms the Dallas Bloods gang, inaugurating a period in the 1990s...
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"Justice Failed is the story of Alton Logan, an African American man who served twenty-six years in prison for a murder he did not commit. In 1983, Logan was falsely convicted of fatally shooting an off-duty Cook County corrections officer, Lloyd M. Wickliffe, at a Chicago-area McDonald's, and sentenced to life in prison. While serving time for unrelated charges, Andrew Wilson--the true murderer--admitted his guilt to his own lawyers, Dale Coventry...
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Rideau brings to vivid life the world of the infamous Angola penitentiary and his long struggle for justice, giving his readers a searing expose of the failures of our legal system framed within his own dramatic tale of how he found meaning, purpose, and hope in prison.