Coming to a Neighborhood Near You: The Repercussions of Crime and Punishment

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.

Jim Reese is an associate professor of English and director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty University in Yankton, South Dakota. He spent fourteen years in residency for the National Endowment for Arts’ interagency initiative with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where he established Yankton Federal Prison Camp’s first creative writing and publishing workshop. He is the author of eight books, including the nonfiction collection Bone Chalk, and has received several awards for his writing and public service.