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The Current – Humanity on Trial

Humanity on Trial

Yusef Salaam, Reuben Jonathan Miller, and Sylvia A. Harvey discuss the urgency of addressing inequality and imbuing humanity in America’s criminal justice system.

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IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

Yusef Salaam

Author of "Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice"

Better, Not Bitter

Better, Not Bitter

Yusef Salaam

Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR

This inspirational memoir serves as a call to action from prison reform activist Yusef Salaam, of the Exonerated Five, that will inspire us all to turn our stories into tools for change in the pursuit of racial justice.

They didn't know who they had.

So begins Yusef Salaam telling his story. No one's life is the sum of the worst things that happened to them, and during Yusef Salaam's seven years of wrongful incarceration as one of the Central Park Five, he grew from child to man, and gained a spiritual perspective on life. Yusef learned that we're all "born on purpose, with a purpose." Despite having confronted the racist heart of America while being "run over by the spiked wheels of injustice," Yusef channeled his energy and pain into something positive, not just for himself but for other marginalized people and communities.

Better Not Bitter is the first time that one of the now Exonerated Five is telling his individual story, in his own words. Yusef writes his narrative: growing up Black in central Harlem in the '80s, being raised by a strong, fierce mother and grandmother, his years of incarceration, his reentry, and exoneration. Yusef connects these stories to lessons and principles he learned that gave him the power to survive through the worst of life's experiences. He inspires readers to accept their own path, to understand their own sense of purpose. With his intimate personal insights, Yusef unpacks the systems built and designed for profit and the oppression of Black and Brown people. He inspires readers to channel their fury into action, and through the spiritual, to turn that anger and trauma into a constructive force that lives alongside accountability and mobilizes change.

This memoir is an inspiring story that grew out of one of the gravest miscarriages of justice, one that not only speaks to a moment in time or the rage-filled present, but reflects a 400-year history of a nation's inability to be held accountable for its sins. Yusef Salaam's message is vital for our times, a motivating resource for enacting change. Better, Not Bitter has the power to soothe, inspire and transform. It is a galvanizing call to action.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Yusef Salaam is the inspirational speaker and prison reform activist, who, at age fourteen was one of the five teenage boys wrongly convicted and sentenced to prison in the Central Park jogger case. In 1997, he left prison as an adult to a world he didn't fully recognize or understand. In 2002, the sentences for the Central Park Five were overturned, and all Five were exonerated for the crime they didn't commit.

 

Yusef now travels the world as an inspirational speaker, speaking about the effects of incarceration and the devastating impact of disenfranchisement. He is an advocate and educator on issues of mass incarceration, police brutality and misconduct, press ethics and bias, race and law, and the disparities in the criminal justice system, especially for men of color.

 

Yusef’s inspirational memoir Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice (Grand Central Publishing, 5/18/2021) serves as a call to action that will inspire us all to turn our stories into tools for change in the pursuit of racial justice.

Reuben Jonathan Miller

Author of "Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration"

Halfway Home

Halfway Home

Reuben Jonathan Miller

A "persuasive and essential" (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller's "stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation's carceral system" (Heather Ann Thompson).

Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record.

Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge member of society is one of America's most nefarious myths. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast.

As The Color of Law exposed about our understanding of housing segregation, Halfway Home shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate. Parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they've paid their debt to society.

Informed by Miller's experience as the son and brother of incarcerated men, captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail. It is a poignant and eye-opening call to arms that reveals how laws, rules, and regulations extract a tangible cost not only from those working to rebuild their lives, but also our democracy. As Miller searchingly explores, America must acknowledge and value the lives of its formerly imprisoned citizens.

PEN America 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist

Winner of the 2022 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences

2022 PROSE Awards Finalist

2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner for Cultural Anthropology and Sociology

An NPR Selected 2021 Books We Love

As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Reuben Jonathan Miller is a sociologist, criminologist and a social worker who teaches at the University of Chicago in the School of Social Service Administration where he studies and writes about race, democracy, and the social life of the city. He has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and a visiting scholar at the University of Texas at Austin and Dartmouth College. A native son of Chicago, he lives with his wife and children on the city’s Southside.

 

In his book Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration (Little Brown, 2/2/2021), Reuben captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail. The book is a poignant and eye-opening call to arms that reveals how laws, rules, and regulations extract a tangible cost not only from those working to rebuild their lives, but also our democracy.

Sylvia A. Harvey

Author of "The Shadow System: Mass Incarceration and the American Family"

The Shadow System

The Shadow System

Sylvia A. Harvey

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 victories of three families struggling to live within the confines of a brutal system. In Florida, a young father tries to maintain a relationship with his daughter despite a sentence of life without parole. In Kentucky, where the opioid epidemic has led to the increased incarceration of women, many of whom are white, one mother fights for custody of her children. In Mississippi, a wife steels herself for her husband's thirty-ninth year in prison and does her best to keep their sons close.

Through these stories, Harvey reveals a shadow system of laws and regulations enacted to dehumanize the incarcerated and profit off their families -- from mandatory sentencing laws, to restrictions on prison visitation, to astronomical charges for brief phone calls.

The Shadow System is an eye-opening account of the way incarceration has impacted generations of American families; it delivers a galvanizing clarion call to fix this broken system.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sylvia A. Harvey reports at the intersection of race, class, and policy. Her work has appeared in The Nation, VQR, ELLE, Colorlines, the Feminist Wire, the New York Post, and more. She is the recipient of a National Headliner Award and a National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) Salute to Excellence award. The Oakland native holds a BA in sociology from Columbia University and a MS in journalism from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Harvey lives in New York City.

 

Sylvia’s book The Shadow System: Mass Incarceration and the American Family (Bold Type Books, 4/7/2020) is an eye-opening account of the way incarceration has impacted generations of American families; it delivers a galvanizing clarion call to fix this broken system.

OUR MODERATORS

Marc M. Howard. J.D., Ph.D.

Marc M. Howard, J.D., Ph.D., is the Founder and President of the Frederick Douglass Project for Justice. In this role, he leads all aspects of the organization and strives to fulfill the Douglass Project’s mission of facilitating structured meetings and respectful conversations between members of free society and prisoners.

 

Prior to founding the Douglass Project, Marc was already an established political science professor and award-winning author when he began visiting his childhood friend Marty Tankleff in prison. These prison visits served to reshape the course of Marc's life, as he dedicated himself to helping overturn Marty's wrongful conviction—even deciding to go to law school to help his friend. After Marty was exonerated and released, Marc continued his transformation into one of the country's most prominent criminal justice and prison reform advocates. He began volunteer teaching in a prison, and started visiting prisons nationwide. These experiences have brought Marc together with people who have made mistakes but still have hopes, dreams, talents, and fears, and who also have families who love them and communities to which they will eventually return. The Frederick Douglass Project for Justice embodies Marc's goal to drive change by increasing connections with, and promoting the humanity of, incarcerated people nationwide.

 

Marc received his B.A. from Yale University, his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his J.D. from Georgetown University. He is also a Professor of Government and Law and the founding director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative at Georgetown University, as well as the author of three books and dozens of academic articles, including his most recent book, Unusually Cruel: Prisons, Punishment, and the Real American Exceptionalism.

 

Clive Priddle

Clive Priddle is the Publisher of PublicAffairs and host of The Current. Clive joined PublicAffairs as executive editor in 2003. He became Editorial Director in 2006, and Publisher in 2012. Since joining PublicAffairs, the authors he has edited include Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Linda Robinson, Natan Sharansky, Kishore Mahbubani, John Kerry, David Rothkopf, Richard Haass, and Muhammad Yunus.

 

Prior to that, he was publishing director of Fourth Estate, a division of HarperCollins, where among the authors he acquired were Sebastian Junger, Laura Hillenbrand, David Ewing Duncan, James Naughtie, Francis Wheen, Geraldine Brooks, Oliver Morton, Eric Larson, and Michela Wrong. He previously worked for four years at Penguin UK. He won the Tony Godwin award in 2001. Born in London, a graduate of Cambridge University, Clive lives with his wife and two sons in northern Manhattan.