Tentatively I stood a great lump of wood on the chopping block and bought the axe down on it. It flew into two perfect halves. Such was my elation that I ran inside, put on our ancient cracked record of Aretha Franklin singing Respect and danced all by myself for half an hour in our living room, without inhibition, almost crying with jubilation – not just about the wood, but because I could live competently some of the time, and because that day I liked myself.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.

At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.

The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.

But there are some wounds that can never be healed.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.