A first-hand account of the death penalty's wholly destructive nature.
In Witness, Lyle C. May offers a scathing critique of shifts in sentencing laws, prison policies that ensure recidivism, and classic "tough on crime" views that don't make society safer or prevent crime. These insightful and analytical essays explore capital punishment, life imprisonment, prison education, prison journalism, as well as what activism from inside looks like on the road toward abolishing the carceral state.
No outside journalist can adequately report what happens inside death row or what it is like to live through thirty-three executions of people you know. May's grounded writings in Witness challenge the myths, misconceptions, and misinformation about the criminal legal system and death in prison, guiding readers on a journey through North Carolina's congregate death row, where the author has spent over twenty years of his life.
With a foreword by activist, lawyer, and professor Danielle Purifoy, and drawing on the work of Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, and other abolitionist scholars, Witness shows there is more to life under the sentence of death than what is portrayed in crime dramas or mass media. Lyle C. May's life, journalism, and activism are a guidebook to abolitionism in practice.
What People Are Saying
"Lyle May is a tempered writer; he’s wise enough to trust the power in his message and to avoid overstating it. He deserves enormous respect and credit — not only for what he has already committed to paper, but for the fact that he has written at all. As May points out, incarcerated activists are not popular among those who are charged with confining them. It’s not surprising that May is no stranger to solitary confinement." The Arts Fuse
"With fierce beauty, Witness brilliantly chronicles the everyday and intimate layers of life on death row in a US prison. May's detailed reporting - and, as powerfully, his critical analysis of the prison industrial complex - illuminates crucial pathways to strengthen our movements for healing and liberation for all." Erica R. Meiners, co-editor of The Long Term and co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now.
"From death row, May not only presents a searing, unflinching and damning first-hand examination of North Carolina's death row, but also walks the reader through the decades of punitive policies that have built this house of hopelessness." Victoria Law, journalist and author of "Prisons Make Us Safer" & 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration