Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

In his long search to process his grief over the rape and murder of his teenage friend by a fellow classmate, Jim Reese becomes entangled in prisons—both physically and psychologically. Coming to a Neighborhood Near You is the result: his investigative memoir of crime and punishment in the twenty-first-century United States.

For fourteen years, Reese worked with men and women in prisons to develop, edit, and produce stories from “system-impacted” students, including some who had committed murder. He went on more than 250 hours of ride-alongs with law enforcement officers to see crime from the front end. He sought to understand addiction, trauma, and why people commit unlawful acts, some hauntingly heinous, with results rippling far beyond the primary victims to families, friends, and communities.

In a forthright reckoning with his own fear, desire for protection, and lingering anxiety, Reese wrestles with what humankind is capable of and what mercy means in the work of moving forward. Coming to a Neighborhood Near You presents true accounts of mass incarceration and an interrogation of how to confront the human rights crisis in America’s criminal justice system.