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Excerpt from Waiting for an Echo by Christine Montross, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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Waiting for an Echo by Christine Montross

Waiting for an Echo

The Madness of American Incarceration

by Christine Montross
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  • Critics' Consensus (5):
  • First Published:
  • Jul 21, 2020, 352 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jul 2021, 352 pages
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About this Book

Print Excerpt


This book shares what I have come to know, as a psychiatrist, about our nation's corrections system. "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons," Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote more than a century ago. This book is about the choices we make in our society about safety and justice. It is about how we mistreat those who run afoul of our laws and how, in doing so, we violate our own standards of humanity. It is also about hope, and vision, and trust that once a problem is faced—truly faced—then perhaps it can be solved.

From Waiting for an Echo by Christine Montross, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Christine Montross.

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