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What justice requires when people change but their sentences stay the same.
America loves a second-chance story. Yet people convicted of serious crimes are seldom given one. Years after taking responsibility and working to repair harm, many remain behind bars under sentences that offer no meaningful opportunity to demonstrate rehabilitation.
Bending the Bars confronts this profound double standard at the heart of American punishment. Grounding law and policy in the lived experiences of people directly affected by extreme sentences, Jessica S. Henry shows why accountability and public safety do not require endless punishment. She argues for a new framework that combines second chance mechanisms—including second look laws and stronger reentry support—and that recognizes the human capacity for change.
Urgent and clear-eyed, this book challenges us to rethink who deserves a second chance, who gets to decide, and what justice demands beyond defining a person by the worst thing they have ever done.
Jessica S. Henry is an attorney and Professor Emerita of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. She is the award-winning author of Smoke but No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened and host of the podcast Just Justice.