Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons. This item is unavailable.Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons

Gates of Injustice is an extraordinarily compelling expose of the American prison system: how more than 2,000,000 Americans came to be incarcerated; what it's really like on the inside; what it's like for the families left on the outside; and how an enormous "prison-industrial complex" has grown to support and promote imprisonment in place of virtually every other alternative.

Reuters journalist Alan Elsner shows how prisons really work, how race-based gangs are able to control institutions and prey on weaker inmates, and how an epidemic of abuse and brutality has exploded across American prisons. Readers will discover the plight of 300,000 mentally ill people in prisons, virtually abandoned with little medical treatment. They'll also meet the fastest growing segment of the prison population: women. Readers go inside "supermax" prisons that cut inmates off from all human contact, and uncover the official corruption and brutality that riddles jail systems in major cities like Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. Finally, they'll learn prisons accelerate the spread of infectious diseases throughout the broader society, just one of the many ways the prison epidemic touches everyone, even if they've never met anyone who's gone to jail.

Alan Elsner has written extensively about conditions in jails and prisons, visiting institutions in a dozen states to meet with inmates, lawyers, corrections officers, medical staff, religious volunteers, family members and law enforcement. He has 25 years' experience in journalism, covering stories ranging from the September 11, 2001 attacks on America and the Arab-Israeli conflict to the 2000 presidential election and the end of the Cold War. Elsner is currently National Correspondent for Reuters news agency. For more information, visit <AlanElsner.com>.