Lifers

<p>John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment - an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide society's purposes of imprisonment and offenders' reformability. Through the lifers' stories he reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.</p>