What's Prison For?

From one of America's most acclaimed journalists, a look inside America's prisons--and a call to make them real places of education and rehabilitation.

What's Prison For? examines the “incarceration” part of “mass incarceration.” What happens inside prisons and jails, where nearly two million Americans are held? Bill Keller, one of America’s most accomplished journalists, has spent years deeply immersed in the subject. He argues that prisons must become places where rehabilitation is a top priority, and introduces us to reformers who are trying to prepare incarcerated people for a better life on the outside.

Keller takes us inside the walls of our prisons, where we meet men and women who have found purpose while in state custody; American corrections officials who have set out to learn from Europe’s state-of-the-art prison campuses; a rehab unit within a Pennsylvania prison, dubbed Little Scandinavia, where lifers serve as mentors; a college behind bars in San Quentin; a rare women's prison that helps imprisoned mothers bond with their children; and Keller's own classroom at Sing Sing. Surprisingly optimistic, What's Prison For? is an indispensable guide to our prison system, and a powerful argument that the status quo is a shameful waste of human potential.

Bill Keller is the founding editor-in-chief of the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organizatin that covers criminal justice in the United States. He was the executive editor of the New York Times and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his reporting on the USSR. He lives on Long Island, New York.