This explosive new book challenges many of the long-prevailing assumptions about how to successfully reintegrate inmates back into our communities. Dr. Lewis is a professor, international speaker and strong supporter of the rights of women, inmates and minorities. She speaks with fervor and passion about beginning an honest discussion about the fate of ex-offenders once they return to society. The writing is scholarly, packed with powerfully reasoned and packed with an array of documented facts and research about "what works" in corrections. How PIE Turns Predators Into Producers, is not only a discussion that needs to take place on the subject of inmate employability and education, but is timely. Dr. Lewis began assertion of views about how inmate reform more than a decade ago, when dangerous policies, actions and trends led to high costs of management and operations of prisons. In a series of lectures and conversations with students and criminal justice practitioners, Dr. Lewis brings some eye-opening insights into the historical development of penal institutions and the prison culture that is today wrongly identified as a place for "black and brown" males.
The disproportionate minority confinement issue is not foreign to Dr. Lewis, who served as the DMC Coordinator for s Governor's Office of Criminal Justice Planning and advocate for effective data collection to track the incarceration of minorities in California juvenile and adult corrections. The real history of the use of work and the jolting re-examination of work and related mores in inmate habilitation really challenges the old traditional notions and practices that dominate corrections today. In general, around the world work and labor is essential to a strong market economy; and in particular, it's utility in inmate reentry ought to be re-examined. This work is inspiring as it is upsetting and adds to the decades of debates and writings about how to return producers rather than predators back to our communities.