Slouching Toward Tyranny: Mass Incarceration, Death Sentences and Racism - Softcover

Joseph B. Ingle began visiting prison inmates while at Union Seminary and living in East Harlem. A native of North Carolina, he returned South to Tennessee and has been working with prisoners, especially the condemned, since 1974.

He has previously published Last Rights: 13 Fatal Encounters with the States Justice and The Inferno: A Southern Morality Tale. He is a graduate of St. Andrews College and received a Merrill Fellowship to Harvard in 1991.

"An angry and autobiographical work, which weaves the author's experiences with Death Row prisoners into a larger consideration of how slavery, this country's policies toward Native Americans, and segregation have shaped history and public opinion about capital punishment in the United States. A white hot Jeremiad, but with the lens of Howard Zinn, about racism in the criminal justice system today." --David Kendall, Mississippi Freedom Summer, Coker v. Georgia, John Spenkelink's lawyer and now with Williams and Connolly.

"Ingle is a passionate witness to the ways in which we fail to live into the democracy and freedom we cherish. He calls for us to take a hard look and admit the ways that the racial tyranny of the majority blocks us from our best selves and feeds the hallows of death row disproportionately with darker skinned bodies. A compelling and haunting read and call to action." --Dr. Emilie M. Townes, E. Rhodes and Leana B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society, Dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School

"This is a powerful and necessary indictment of capital punishment and the vast system of racial and social control in the United States known as mass incarceration. The history told here is essential to understanding the precarious, and morally bereft, state of our democracy." --Michelle Alexander, civil rights lawyer, advocate, Assoc. Prof. of Law at Ohio State, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.