In Spite of the Consequences

“In a powerful set of letters from his more than two decades of wrongful incarceration, Lacino Hamilton demonstrates why our prison system must be abolished and why we must listen to the voices of freedom fighters like Hamilton who have spent years inside the beastly system. A must-read for anyone who wants to fully understand how mass incarceration works and why prison can never define anyone like Hamilton.” –James Kilgore, author of Understanding Mass Incarceration, and National Book Award winner

“In Spite of the Consequences is Lacino Hamilton’s blistering indictment of the outsized American prison system… . Persuasive and passionate, [the book] envisions no less than a wholesale abolition of prisons in favor of adopting community-based governance and restorative-justice principles.” –Foreword Reviews

“Lacino Hamilton’s story is one of abolition learned not in the halls of academia, but in a cold prison cell. He is one of a growing cadre of people incarcerated and formerly incarcerated who assert their centrality in the struggle for the end of prisons. This is a collection of letters from prison in the spirit of George Jackson’s Soledad Brother–letters that can be both intimate and analytical. They search for an understanding of the problem that is not only one of individuals, but of a corrupt system bent on prosecutions, not justice.” –Brian Dolinar, journalist and author of The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation

Lacino Hamilton is a writer, thinker, and activist who was incarcerated for twenty-six years due to a wrongful conviction for which he was exonerated in September 2020. His essays on prison abolition have appeared in Truthout, The New Inquiry, PEN America, The Michigan Citizen, and the San Francisco Daily. He lives in Michigan.

William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) has written extensively about social justice, education, and democracy. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; and Demand the Impossible!