This is a compelling, often hilarious, and unfailingly compassionate portrait of life inside a women's prison. With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, the author barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College...

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as...

Seventeen-year-old Luce, who is suspected of killing her boyfriend, is sent to a Savannah, Georgia, reform school where she meets two intriguing boys and learns the truth about the strange shadows that have always haunted her.

Independently produced by Bennie Zeidman, Hell's house (1932) is a Pre-Code melodrama that captured Bette Davis and Pat O'Brien just before they were catapulted to superstardom at Warner Bros. An exposé of the American penal system (not unlike I am a fugitive from a Chain Gang and The mayor of hell), Hell's house stars Junior Durkin as a wholesome farmboy who moves to the city after the death of his mother. Dazzled by the smooth talk and beautiful...

"It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. Already a bestseller in France and certain to be read worldwide for generations to come, Small Things...

Florence "Florida" Baum is not the hapless innocent she claims to be when she arrives at the Arizona women's prison--or so her ex-cellmate, Diosmary Sandoval, keeps insinuating. Dios knows the truth about Florida's crimes, understands the truth that Florence hides even from herself: that she wasn't a victim of circumstance, an unlucky bystander misled by a bad man. Dios knows that darkness lives in women too, despite the world's refusal to see it....

The author provides an account of her thirteen months in a minimum security correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, where she was sent after being convicted on a ten-year-old charge of drug smuggling and money laundering in 2003. The book offers insights into the heirarchies, communities, and friendships that characterize the women's prison.

"Sage Winters always knew her sister was a little different even though they were identical twins. They loved the same things and shared a deep understanding, but Rosemary -- awake to every emotion, easily moved to joy or tears -- seemed to need more protection from the world. Six years after Rosemary's death from pneumonia, Sage, now sixteen, still misses her deeply. Their mother perished in a car crash, and Sage's stepfather, Alan, resents being...

At Hellenweiler, a reformatory for second-offenders, fourteen-year-old Hal Mitchell will soon be free if he can avoid the gang violence of his fellow inmates, but the real enemy may lie elsewhere.

"2017: When Angela Creighton discovers a mysterious letter containing a life-shattering confession, she is determined to find the intended recipient. Her search takes her back to the 1970s when a group of daring women operated an illegal underground abortion network in Toronto known only by its whispered code name: Jane. 1971: As a teenager, Dr. Evelyn Taylor was sent to a home for 'fallen' women where she was forced to give up her baby for adoption--a...