The current discourse on crime and punishment in this country is simplistic, fraught with ignorance, and tinged with hysteria....
Criminals, for the most part, aren't monsters. A few are, of course, the superstars of crime: Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy. But the monsters are the exceptions, not the rule. The majority of criminals are a lot like you and me, and any number of them are redeemable.
Our present system, unfortunately, does little or nothing to redeem our redeemable convicts. We don't offer them a chance to turn around. And that's too bad for us and tragic for them. We're wasting far too many lives in our prisons. And our present "no frills" approach to corrections is nothing more than a recipe for precipitously increasing the rate at which ex-convicts re-offend.
It is my hope that this book, in its own small way, will change the terms of the current debate; that it will counter rampant ignorance and hysteria about our criminals with a measure of common sense.