The violence of our lives

the long version

"Through interviews with men and women convicted of killing by near-accident, during acts of passion, or in contract hits, Parker reveals their stories, their motives, their thoughts: none claims innocence; some show remorse. Parker collects their conversations and, by subtle arrangement, achieves an extraordinary narrative tension. Among those who talked with him were a man who spent three years on Death Row awaiting execution and another who was strapped in the electric chair before being reprieved; a pastor of a revivalist church in the Deep South who became a born-again fundamentalist in prison; a former prostitute who murdered her pimp and set fire to his body; a lawyer and former addict who shot her live-in drug dealer boyfriend; a personnel manager now out of prison on parole after serving seventeen years for a street-brawl stabbing; and many others - men and women, black and white, some of whom are regarded as so dangerous and violent that they are incarcerated in maximum-security prisons with no chance of ever being released. Finally, there are interviews with relatives of people who were murdered - scarred forever, like the offenders, by the violence of our lives." "From each interview there emerges a story so individual, vivid, and skillfully rendered that it challenges any assumptions about the causes of crime and the justification of punishment."--BOOK JACKET.