Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption - Softcover

Walidah Imarisha relates the experiences of crime, punishment, and victimization, not as abstractions, but as lived ­human tragedies. She shows us how they diminish and distort - but never define - the lives of those who suffer them. Writing with sorrow, and anger, and courageous hope, she forces us to reconsider what we mean by 'justice,' and by what endeavors its cause might be advanced, if never finally achieved. --Kristian Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America

Angels with Dirty Faces is a powerful exploration of America's prison nation. Using three disparate yet interconnected stories, including her own, Walidah Imarisha gives us an unvarnished take on prison abolition. Beyond slogans or strategy, we are left with people, in all our imperfections and possibilities. This is a bold, beautiful, and absolutely necessary book, told with urgency and passion. --Dan Berger, author of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

We live in a violent state, run by a violent economic trap, that a violent prison system perpetuates and hides. The reality of violence in the US is so pervasive that the state has all the mirrors in the house covered up. Angels with Dirty Faces is a memoir of a reality so crucial and transformative that the state is desperate to keep it locked out of our collective consciousness. And yet we live it. Here, Imarisha is doing the work that we all must do if we are going to have the world we deserve. She is looking deeply at the violence of prisons and the lives and impact of people who have engaged in violent acts with a love that never stops believing that we are more than the violence that structures our days. There is hope, love, and honesty here. And a model for the conversations we need to have right now, right here in hell. --Alexis Pauline Gumbs