Recommendations
Books Like Just Mercy
Best books to read after Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Just Mercy is a memoir about the American criminal justice system as it is experienced by those it destroys — the wrongly convicted, the sentenced-as-children, the poor and the Black. These 8 books extend the inquiry into race, law, and the cost of mass incarceration from multiple angles.
- 1
Buy on AmazonThe New Jim Crow
by Michelle Alexander
Alexander's 2010 book provides the structural and historical argument that Just Mercy illustrates through individual cases: that mass incarceration of Black Americans is a system of racialized social control, not simply a response to crime, and that the War on Drugs has functioned as the mechanism for reinstating Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement through the criminal justice system.
- 2
Buy on AmazonBetween the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's 2015 letter to his son about the Black body in America provides the personal and visceral complement to Just Mercy's legal and systemic account — where Stevenson documents the mechanisms by which the system destroys Black bodies, Coates describes what it feels like to live in a Black body in a country where those mechanisms operate.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Innocent Man
by John Grisham
Grisham's 2006 nonfiction account of Ron Williamson, wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Ada, Oklahoma — Grisham's only nonfiction book — is the most accessible popular account of wrongful conviction in American publishing and the natural companion to Just Mercy for readers interested in the Innocence Project and its work.
- 4
Buy on AmazonPicking Cotton
by Jennifer Thompson-Cannino
Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton's 2009 co-authored memoir — in which a rape survivor and the man she wrongly identified and convicted as her rapist tell their story together — is the most intimate account of wrongful conviction in American memoir and an essential companion to Stevenson's more systemic account.
- 5
Buy on AmazonSlavery by Another Name
by Douglas A. Blackmon
Blackmon's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 history of convict leasing — the post-Civil War system by which Black men were arrested on trivial or manufactured charges and leased to corporations as forced labor — is the historical foundation for understanding the New Jim Crow argument and for placing Just Mercy's cases in their deepest historical context.
- 6
Buy on AmazonOrange Is the New Black
by Piper Kerman
Kerman's 2010 memoir about her year in federal prison for drug money laundering provides a first-person account of incarceration from inside the system that complements Stevenson's view from the legal representation side — and the television series it inspired brought the reality of mass incarceration to a mass audience.
- 7
Buy on AmazonDevil in the Grove
by Gilbert King
King's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2012 account of Thurgood Marshall's defense of four young Black men wrongly accused of raping a white woman in Groveland, Florida in 1949 is the historical parallel to Just Mercy — Marshall doing in 1949 what Stevenson does today, in a legal climate even more hostile, with stakes as high as death.
- 8
Buy on AmazonSister Outsider
by Audre Lorde
Lorde's 1984 collection of essays provides the political and theoretical framework for understanding why the criminal justice system operates as it does — the same intersection of race, class, and power that Stevenson documents case by case, articulated as a systematic analysis of how American society produces and maintains these structures.
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