From award-winning investigative journalist Kyle Swenson, Good Kids, Bad City is the true story of the longest wrongful imprisonment in the United States to end in exoneration, and a critical social and political history of Cleveland, the city that convicted them.
“This is a book for anyone with a social consciousness,” said a review published in goodreads.com.
Another review added: “This book was hard to read, not because it was bad but because it is so hard to believe that things such as these stories told in this book are ones that are still happening in the world today.”
The book tells the story of a man who ended up in jail for a crime that he did not commit and the stories behind the city, the people, and the reasons why it happened and why it took almost 40 years for him to be release.
In a review published in The Washington Post, Mark Whitaker said Good Kids, Bad City “is a powerful addition to the growing literature on the failures of America’s criminal justice system, particularly in dealing with African American men.”
Whitaker added: “But it is also a gripping, novelistic account of what happened to the three defendants and their lone accuser after the convictions, a frank confession of the methods and emotions of an obsessed reporter, and a poignant meditation on the dark side of Cleveland and what became of that once-proud embodiment of Midwestern virtues that allowed this travesty to happen.”
