Our popular entertainment often deals with our concerns with violent crime, crime investigation and what we perceive to be "justice." Surviving Justice is a book about what happens to those for whom the system has failed -- and failed miserably. There are a myriad of social, psychological, and legal reasons for the failure of the system, and the thirteen personal stories of innocent people who were unjustly convicted, incarcerated, and later exonerated put a human face on the problems our criminal justice system has not yet solved.

Surviving Justice is the first of the Voice of Witness series, which is a joint project of McSweeney's Books and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The series will use oral histories to help shed light on pressing issues of social justice. Books are planned on Hurricane Katrina and on the genocide in the Sudan, using oral histories of survivors and refugees.

This book features transcriptions of personal interviews with each of the people who were wrongfully convicted and details the circumstances of their cases and their often difficult readjustment to a world that changed radically while they were in prison. Interspersed with the interviews, and included in several appendices, are explanations of some of the legal issues and complexities as well as some of the techniques used to investigate crimes and extract confessions. There are also photos that further reinforce the fact that these are ordinary people whose lives have been changed forever.

Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated is shelved on the basement level of the Library at call number K5560 .S87 2005.

Charles Dabkowski wrote this Monthly Book Spotlight.