These Walls

“[An] absorbing debut… fascinating … our current system – expensive, dysfunctional, and biased as it is – has little to lose by considering innovative ways of ensuring public safety and justice for all.” * Christian Science Monitor *
“Eva Fedderly’s book These Walls adds one more voice to the growing understanding that it is a failure. The straightforward prose and personal stories here make the argument for reconsidering and ultimately replacing this approach to societal problems that result in crime one that is accessible to anyone with interest in the matter.” * Counterpunch *
“Journalist Fedderly centers this incisive debut exploration of mass incarceration… an accessible and thought-provoking study.” * Publishers Weekly (starred review) *
“Insightful… Fedderly vividly catalogs some of the worst problems at Rikers: overcrowding, unsanitary environments, routine violence, rampant and unaddressed mental health problems, and extraordinarily long wait times before court dates…. [and] concludes convincingly that versions of restorative justice, the expansion of community policing, and broader efforts to reduce poverty and promote social equity are essential to making the penal system more just and humane. A bracing look at how the nation’s jails—and the nation itself—ought to be reformed.” * Kirkus Reviews *
“Can America design its way out of a broken criminal justice system that feeds a daily crisis in city jails? Yes, says author Eva Fedderly, but only if we stop seeing ‘abolition’ as a four-letter word. These Walls reframes the debate around the country’s incarceration crisis, with a compelling focus on architecture as a path forward.” * Tony Messenger, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Profit and Punishment *
“An important book… This is a discussion we need to have and These Walls is a great introduction to the key issues. Readers will be better educated for the experience, whichever side they come down on.” * Richard E. Wener, author of The Environmental Psychology of Prison and Jails *
“Filled with key perspectives from those on the front lines of the ‘war on crime,’ Eva Fedderly’s These Walls is a critical intervention in the high stakes debate about the social value of jails and what we could do instead to create safety and justice.” * Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing *
“Eva Fedderly’s deep commitment to confronting the complexities of criminal justice reform is evident on every page of this prismatic survey. Especially engaging is her visit to a cellblock in the nation’s first bona fide penitentiary, outside Philadelphia, as well as her look at attempts to design more humane prisons. The endemic problems of our penal system, Fedderly concludes, will not be resolved until we create a more socioeconomically equitable America.” * David Friend, author of Watching the World Change and editor of creative development at Vanity Fair *

Eva Fedderly’s investigative reporting has been published in Architectural Digest, New York magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Esquire, and Courthouse News, where she reported hundreds of news-breaking stories on the American legal system. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard University, and lives in New York City and New Orleans. These Walls is her first book.

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