April 18, 2006

MINNEAPOLIS – Quakers founded America's first "penitentiary" in the 1790s. Now, with more than forty years of working with prisoners, parolees, alternatives to incarceration, and victims of crime, the American Friends Services Committee, a Quaker-sponsored organization, offers a major policy review in Beyond Prisons by Laura Magnani and Harmon L. Wray.

Beyond Prisons is a strong indictment of the current system that traces the history and features of our penal system, offers strong ethical and moral assessments of it, and lays out a whole new paradigm of criminal justice based on restorative or transformative justice and reconciliation. The book puts forward a 12-point plan for immediate changes.

Bound to stir debate and reflection, Beyond Prisons opens a long-needed national dialogue on our responsibilities as citizens and as a nation to provide remediation rather than mere retributive incarceration, answerable to the common good and the justice of God. "This book is the fruit of years of organizing, advocacy, and reflection concerning our deeply broken criminal justice system. Magnani and Wray offer a truly radical analysis that penetrates to the roots of the crisis, challenges long-held assumptions, and imagines thoughtful alternatives. It is the finest critique of the prison-industrial complex available." – Ched Myers, educator, activist, and theological animator with Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries, Oak View, California

Laura Magnani is Assistant Regional Director for Justice for the American Friends Service Committee in Oakland California, and author of America's First Penitentiary: A 200-Year-Old Failure (AFSC, 1990).

Harmon L. Wray is Director of the Vanderbilt Program in Faith and Criminal Justice and a 2005-2006 Soros Senior Justice Fellow. He is the author of Restorative Justice: Moving Beyond Punishment (General Board of Global Ministries, United Methodist Church, 2002).

Beyond Prisons, Format: Paperback, 5.5" x 8.5," 208 pp, ISBN: 0-8006-3832-8, Publisher: Fortress Press, Price: $13.00.

To order Beyond Prisons please call Fortress Press at 1-800-328-4648 or visit the Web site at http://www.fortresspress.com/.

Fortress Press