Making Worlds Book Launch and Discussion: Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers 25 Years Later

We will delve into the realities of serving a Death by Incarceration sentence through a panel discussion with the authors of Still Doing Life—Howard Zehr and Barb Toews—as well as Irvin Moore, one of the former lifers featured in the book, and Saleem Holbrook, a former juvenile lifer. The speakers will examine the trajectory of life sentences since the first edition of the book was published in 1996, into the present, and moving forward.

In 1996, Howard Zehr, a criminal justice activist and photographer, published Doing Life, a book of photo portraits of twenty-two individuals serving life sentences without the possibility of parole at a prison in Pennsylvania. Twenty-five years later, Zehr revisited many of the same individuals and photographed them in the same poses. In Still Doing Life, Zehr and coauthor Barb Toews present the two photos of each individual side by side, along with interviews conducted at the two different photo sessions, creating a deeply disturbing tableaux of people who literally have not moved for the past quarter century.

In the tradition of other compelling photo books including Milton Rogovin’s Triptychs and Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, Still Doing Life offers a riveting longitudinal look at a group of people over an extended period of time—in this case with devastating implications for the American criminal justice system. Each night in the United States, more than 200,000 men and women incarcerated in state and federal prisons will go to sleep facing the reality that they may die without ever returning home. There could be no more compelling book to challenge readers to think seriously about the consequences of life sentences.

Howard Zehr and Barb Toews in conversation with Irvin Moore, one of the former lifers featured in the book, and Saleem Holbrook, executive director of Straight Ahead.

“A rare, compassionate, and bracing view into the personal meaning of life sentences for the people serving them. Few books have a temporal range that even begins to approach the length of the sentences they speak about. Still Doing Life invites us to consider deeply and differently the effect of long sentences and, I hope, to imagine what else might be possible.”—Danielle Sered, executive director of Common Justice and author of Until We Reckon

Note: Straight Ahead is hosting a virtual, statewide interfaith panel for Second Chances month on April 19, and we are partnering with Senator Street's office for the Road to Redemption panel on March 31 at Eastern State Penitentiary. Follow Straight Ahead social media for more info. 

Purchase your copy of Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers, 25 Years Later (Howard Zehr and Barb Toews) ahead of the event. 

This event will be live-streamed by Making Worlds. Registration is encouraged.