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.
Language
English
Pages
238
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Henry Holt & Company
Release
September 30, 1996
ISBN
0805049576
ISBN 13
9780805049572
The Violence of Our Lives: Interviews with American Murderers
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.