Just Mercy

This is a memoir of an individual lawyer, but also a book about mass incarceration and the death penalty in the United States. It's about racism and poverty, but also the giant uncaring bureaucracy that the modern justice system has become - judges giving out harsher penalties to influence their reelection, exonerating evidence being illegally upheld due to public pressure to solve a crime quickly, in one absolutely bizarre case a defendant's court-appointed lawyer cashing a cheque that was intended to serve as evidence because there was a dispute about court fees.

I would recommend this to anyone who has never really thought about prison before - the ways that being incarcerated affects people forever even without the death penalty read like cruel and unusual punishment.