In this episode of News from the Peak, we are joined by Howard Zehr, a foundational practitioner and theorist of restorative justice and the coauthor of the recently published book Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers, 25 Years Later.*

The book combines two sets of interviews and photos of people serving life sentences without parole. Zehr gathered the first set in 1990s and published them in his 1996 book Doing Life. About five years ago, he went back to talk to and photograph many of the same people.

The episode digs into what prompted Zehr to take up and return to this project and what he—and the people he talked to—thought had changed in that time.

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When Zehr began to interview and photograph people in Pennsylvania who had been sentenced to life without parole in the early 1990s, America’s incarceration rate was skyrocketing. By 2020 there were about as many Americans serving life sentences in prison as there were people in prison in 1970, according to the Sentencing Project. Between 2003 and 2020, the Sentencing Project calculates that the number of people serving the harshest type of life sentence—life without the possibility of parole—shot up by 66%.

More than half of the people serving life without parole are Black. The number of women facing these sentences has grown by 43% since 2008.

A photographer with a gift for meditative yet playful imagery, Zehr wanted people outside the prison system to get a sense of who these people were as people, not prisoners. Instead of state-issued clothes, they dressed the way they would’ve at home and sat however they wanted to. Zehr used a neutral, studio-style background instead of showing them next to bars or other cliched, dehumanizing symbols of prison life. When published in Doing Life, the interviews were given as unbroken narratives in the subjects’ own voices.

In 2017 Zehr revisited many of the same people for a second round of interviews and photos.

Coauthored with Barb Toews, an associate professor in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington, Tacoma, Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers, 25 Years Later collects both the earlier and more recent groups of interviews and portraits.

The result is a remarkable glimpse into the many ways that people respond to and think about life imprisonment. In the later interviews, many people talk about their desire to give back to the community. Some are working through the arduous process of commutation so they can get back to the outside world. Almost all of them talk about the effect that their sentence has had on their families, including children and grandchildren. These kinds of connections reinforce the message implicit in the title of both the original book and this last one: we are all, in some sense, doing life.

Anyone interested in this book should also look at Zehr’s Transcending, a 2001 book of interviews and photos of victims of violent crimes.

The 2010 book What Will Happen to Me, coauthored by Zehr and Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, which combines photos and interviews with children whose parents are incarcerated, might be of particular interest to people in child support, child welfare, and the courts.

* Full disclosure: Zehr is my father-in-law, making this episode another entry in our ongoing informal series of podcasts we like to call Leveraging Nepotism.

Podcast Episode - Restorative Justice, an interview with Howard Zehr