The shocking and absorbing account of life in the hell of the Soviet Gulag system is told in all his horrific details here by Elinor Lipper.

Chain Gang Fugitive, first published in 1932 as I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is the dramatic firsthand account of Robert Burns and his struggle to live a normal life following a single disastrous choice he had made as a young man. Robert E. Burns was a shell-shocked and penniless veteran who found himself at the mercy of Georgia's barbaric penal system when he fell in with a gang of petty thieves. Sentenced to six to ten years' hard...

"A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California's wildfires"-- Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California's blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. Lowe has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program....

A socialist story of "atoms for peace" and compulsory labor in an East German uranium mine under Soviet control. Banned at Soviet insistence, it impresses even today with its political complexity, variety of characters and realistic portrayal of daily work in a forbidden zone of the industrial landscape. Sun seekers was banned in 1958 at the urging of the USSR, in part because it is about Soviet-German relations and the mining of uranium to support...

"The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon...

In 1891, thousands of Tennessee miners rose up against the use of convict labor by the state's coal companies, eventually engulfing five mountain communities in a rebellion against government authority. Propelled by the insurgent sensibilities of Populism and Gilded Age unionism, the miners initially sought to abolish the convict lease system through legal challenges and legislative lobbying. When nonviolent tactics failed to achieve reform, the predominantly...

A sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. From the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these "debts," prisoners were sold...

"In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. However, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, and the reformers' efforts...

"A study of county convict road work, with case histories of typical Negro convicts. A careful, scientific work, yet of considerable human interest..."--Cover.