Rectify

“Lara Bazelon’s groundbreaking book Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction is a searing indictment of the criminal justice system’s penchant for flawed practices, depraved indifference toward offenders and wanton abuses of power.” —Juvenile Justice Information Exchange “Rectify takes perhaps the first fair and balanced look at the unique and devastating harm that wrongful convictions inflict. From the original victims and the innocent men and women to our families and wider communities, Lara Bazelon’s groundbreaking work demonstrates that by collectively showing up and bearing witness to each other’s trauma, we can unpack our grief, restore our voices, and become strong and powerful wounded healers.” —Jennifer Thompson, coauthor of Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption and founder of Healing Justice “Lara Bazelon is a personal hero of mine. She fearlessly tackles treacherous legal issues with her brain and her pen, and the results are profound. In Rectify, she shines a light on the ‘second punishment’ that follows exoneration: the stigmas and obstacles that former prisoners and crime victims face even though they’ve already paid a terrible price. I highly recommend this book.” —Jason Flom, CEO of Lava Records and host of Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flom “Almost always, discussions of restorative justice consider only its role in mending the lives of victims, offenders, and the community when guilt is clear and accepted. But, to paraphrase a senior legislator this vital book quotes, in courts it is not only justice that we do; it is injustice too. Now Lara Bazelon focuses her remarkable ability to tell stories on that overlooked rip in the fabric: the cases in which the convict is innocent, in which the person in prison is not the offender at all. As she shows movingly and simply, the principles of restorative justice have an invaluable role in mending there too. Starting today, no examination of restorative justice will be adequate without considering what Lara Bazelon has added with Rectify.” —Dean Strang, defense lawyer in State of Wisconsin v. Steven Avery and author of Worse Than the Devil “The innocence movement transformed the way we think about the criminal justice system by exonerating thousands of wrongfully convicted men and women. Rectify asks what healing looks like, for them and for the crime victims whose lives have been upended. It is a story about restorative justice that is by turns tragic, inspiring, and triumphant.” —Barry Scheck, cofounder and director of the Innocence Project