The Jailhouse Lawyer

Nancy Allen

Little, Brown , 2021

Agent: Jill Marr

In picture-perfect Erva, Alabama, the most serious crimes are misdemeanors. Speeding tickets. Shoplifting. Contempt of court. 
 
Then why is the jail so crowded? And why are so few prisoners released? There’s only one place to learn the truth behind these incriminating secrets. 
 
Sometimes the best education a lawyer can get is a short stretch of hard time. 

Accolades:

“I couldn’t put down The Jailhouse Lawyer, a page-turning legal thriller that exposes a headline-making crisis in the American courts: the new debtors’ prisons, where an inability to pay court costs sentences poor people to jail, with devastating consequences.” — Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Tony Messenger, author of Profit and Punishment: How America Criminalizes the Poor in the Name of Justice