Pam Mueller's pseudponyms for the twenty-two very real high school students she researched, observed, interviewed, and worked closely with, in preparation for this powerful narrative.

The number of women in United States prisons has increased dramatically since the 1980s, and has in proportion outpaced that of men’s incarceration. Despite these numbers, incarcerated women, and women lifers specifically, represent a relatively small percentage of the overall correctional and lifer populations. As such, women lifers are easy to overlook, discount, and diminish as such a small group. Many women lifers perceive themselves as a forgotten group; most often those whom we “lock up” and “throw away the key”. They feel excluded from prison programming within and from their own families outside. They feel stigmatized by staff and other women in prison. Aging fast, many have real fears about declining health and losing family members over lengthy stretches of time. However, women lifers are some of the most resilient and strongest women who survive life in prison with the support of each other and religious faith, often transforming themselves in the process of doing time. While most of the women had extensive histories of trauma, abuse, and mental health issues, few had prior experience as offenders. Despite the term “lifer”, many of these women will be released from prison after serving long sentences. Beyond this basic profile, there is much more to learn and share about the lives of women lifers. Focusing on women’s pathways into prison, the ways they cope with life behind bars, and their diverse reentry needs, Meredith Dye and Ronald Aday give voice to women lifers and place their experiences within the larger context of penal harm policies. The authors look at their physical and mental health, family connections, adjustment to prison, prison supports and activities, and experiences with abuse/trauma; while also looking at the growing public and policy concerns over mass incarceration in general. Women Lifers provides insight into the lives of incarcerated women before, during, and following a life sentence, especially the population of those serving life sentences. With the growing numbers of women lifers in the United States, the authors emphasize the importance for the public and policymakers to understand the unique circumstances that brought these women to prison, the policies that keep them there, and the major challenges they face in carving out a successful life in prison and beyond.

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment – an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, society’s purposes of imprisonment, and offenders’ reformability. Through the lifers’ stories, he reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.

This book is the first Australian study, based on extensive fieldwork, of the personal backgrounds and processes by which juveniles get drawn into risky and violent situations that culminate in murder. Drawing on interviews with every juvenile under sanction of life imprisonment in the State of South Australia (2015–2019), it investigates links in the chain of events that led to the lethal violence that probably would have been broken had there been appropriate intervention. Specifically, the book asks whether the existing criminal justice frame is the appropriate way to deal with children who commit grave acts. The extent to which prison facilitates and/or inhibits the mental, emotional, and social development of juvenile ‘lifers’ is a critical issue. Most – if not all – will be released at some point, with key issues of risk (public protection) and rehabilitation (probability of desistance) coming sharply to the fore. In addition, this book is also the first to capture how significant others including mothers, fathers, grandparents, and siblings are affected when children kill and the level of commitment these relatives have towards supporting the prisoner in his or her quest to build a positive future. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, andpenology; practitioners working in social policy; and all those interested in the lives and backgrounds of juvenile offenders.

Allow yourself to awaken from the slumber of monotony you exist in and there is where you may find the answers which your heart most desires. Under the cloak of control and power you wait anxiously for signs of salvation which you are not capable of seeing. Pull away the layers of theory, religion and politics and face what is real. And although I am only 11 years old, I tell you with full confidence, your beginning is near and soon you too will realize that there is more to what you might have believed about life, death, failure and success. Look around you and open your mind to the possibility that all is not black and white or even right or wrong. We live among you and although you may never sense us, we are here and we are real. Consider me your guide in a world very few are fortunate enough to see. I am like you and I struggle to understand what I am to do with this life I have been given. Yet what is truly important is that you understand that your existence is complex and I shall venture to say that your definition of The Circle of Life will change forever. Believe it or not? I dare youdouble dare you to turn to the next page.

For fans of James Dashner and Scott Westerfeld, a riveting sci-fi thriller about a boy in the not-so-distant future who stumbles upon a secret prison for teens underneath his city. Fear haunts the streets of Preston's city: a girl has disappeared. Preston is drawn to investigate, exploring the city in the hunt for his missing friend. And deep in the bowels of a secret scientific institute, he discovers a sinister machine used to banish teenage criminals for their offenses.Captured and condemned to a cavernous dimension, Preston is determined to escape. But this is no ordinary jail. Friendships will be forged and lives will be lost in a reckless battle for freedom, revenge--and revolution. Set in a world all too similar to our own, Lifers is thrilling, pulse-pounding storytelling of the highest degree.