About this item
Through intimate portraits of four exonerated prisoners, journalist Alison Flowers explores what happens to innocent people when the state flings open the jailhouse door and tosses them back, empty-handed into the unknown. From the front lines of the wrongful conviction capital of the United States - Cook County, Ill. - these stories reveal serious gaps in the criminal justice system. Flowers depicts the collateral damage of wrongful convictions on families and communities, challenging the deeper problem of mass incarceration in the United States. As she tells each exoneree's powerful story, Flowers vividly shows that release from prison, though sometimes joyous and hopeful, is not a Hollywood ending - or an ending at all. Rather, an exoneree's first unshackled steps are the beginning of a new journey full of turmoil and triumph.
About the Author
Alison Flowers is an award-winning investigative journalist who focuses on social justice and criminal justice. She is the author of the "Exoneree Diaries: The Fight for Innocence, Independence and Identity" (Haymarket Books, 2016) , based on the yearlong multimedia series for Chicago Public Media, which was a finalist for a national Online Journalism Award in 2014. Flowers also contributed to the anthology "Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect? : Police Violence and Resistance in the United States."
Flowers works at the Invisible Institute, a journalism production company on the South Side of Chicago, where she was part of a team win for the December 2015 Sidney Award by the Hillman Foundation. The Invisible Institute also won the Knight News Challenge on Data for its Citizens Police Data Project. Flowers is a fellow with the Social Justice News Nexus, an investigative journalism project supported by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
Flowers' work has appeared on CNN, CBS, PBS, The Village Voice, VICE News, ABA Journal, The Huffington Post, Chicago Public Media, Truthout, Univision, Bust Magazine, UTNE Reader, Marie Claire, The Advocate, The Grio and elsewhere. Flowers has been quoted in justice-focused stories in numerous media outlets, including Newsweek, USA Today, Vox, ABC News, The New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor. At the 2015 Howard Zinn Book Fair, Flowers participated on the panel, "Women Writing Against the Prison Industrial Complex." In 2014, she moderated a panel featuring women exonerees at the annual international Innocence Network conference. The Illinois Humanities Council also featured Flowers at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2014, and she headlined at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts in 2015.
From 2011 to 2013, Flowers worked as a research associate at Northwestern University's Medill Justice Project where she contributed to the investigations of potentially wrongful convictions and explored other systemic criminal justice issues. Flowers wrote several stories for the project's "Spotlight on Shaken-Baby Syndrome," which was awarded a Peter Lisagor Award by the Chicago Headline Club, the largest chapter of the national Society of Professional Journalists.
Prior to her work at Medill, Flowers worked as an on-air TV reporter in Georgia. There she broke the story when serial murder crime scene evidence - viable material for DNA testing that a judge testified in federal court had been destroyed - was discovered in a police department basement. The revelation ultimately led to a stay in a death row inmate's scheduled execution, resulting in the first DNA tests in the more than 30-year-old case. Flowers' work also made national headlines when she reported that a Georgia homeless shelter discriminated against gays and lesbians. In another watchdog story, a police chief and Georgia peace of
