Steve Earle
Most us us have formed whatever opinion we hold on the death penalty without any direct experience of what life is like inside an institution specially designed by trial and error to utterly dehumanize its inhabitants (and by inevitable, toxic osmosis, its employees) in order that WE THE PEOPLE are able to take their lives at a given time on a given date. Pray that In This Timeless Time is as close as you ever get.
Michael Ratner
In This Timeless Time is a cry of the heart . . . and should become the definitive book on the medieval cruelty of our Death Rows. Once read, none of us can turn our view away and say, 'We did not know."
Mumia Abu-Jamal
In In This Timeless Time, authors Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian have accomplished something quite remarkable. Granted virtually unprecedented access to one of the darkest, least-seen sectors of American society (Death Row), and they have emerged from this foreboding place with something terrible and beautiful. For what is more terrible than this modern-day place of skulls, this (to quote a former Supreme Court justice, Harry Blackmun) "machinery of death"? Beauty? Where can beauty be in such a haunting, fatal place? And then one looks at photos, black and white, showing men at play, men in tight discussion, men with visages of hopelessness, loss, and hope. Yes, hope. The access shown here, to make such a project possible with few restrictions, would scarcely happen today. The authors reveal a Death Row (in Texas's infamous Ellis Unit) that was, as horrible as it was, light years better than the bitter present. A revelation came to me as I gazed at these pictures from the recent past, and over a thousand miles away: every death row is different; and every death row is the same. Jackson and Christian have pulled back the proverbial curtain so that all can see the American Way of Death.
Billy Sothern
In This Timeless Time presents images and words of condemned men who are otherwise abstractions and provides a compelling history of death row over the last thirty years. Nothing like this book exists, or could ever exist again. I could not recommend this book more strongly.
John Lewis
In the over twenty years since Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian's work on a Texas death row began, correcting the injustices of capital punishment has been much too slow. In This Timeless Time underscores how urgent and critical it is to give voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless. This first-rate work speaks to our shared need as Americans to right the wrong that is capital punishment.
From the Publisher
In This Timeless Time presents images and words of condemned men who are otherwise abstractions and provides a compelling history of death row over the last thirty years. Nothing like this book exists, or could ever exist again. I could not recommend this book more strongly.—Billy Sothern, death penalty lawyer and author of Down In New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City
Kerry Max Cook
These photos rewind, then freeze, time, catapulting me back to a place that still invades the core of who and what I am today, nearly thirty-four years later. Most everyone in this book was executed. Most everyone said they were innocent. I did too . . . and I was. 'It's not about innocence or guilt, Kerry,' Bruce Jackson told me in 1979 as I peered out of my cell during our first interview. 'It's about what we do as a society.' I didn't get it back then, but I do now. With this book, Bruce and Diane have captured the face of America's death penalty machine.
