The Other Side of Prospect A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City

One New Haven summer evening in 2006, a retired grandfather was shot point-blank by a young stranger. A hasty police investigation culminated in an innocent sixteen-year-old boy being sentenced to prison for thirty-eight years. New Haven native and acclaimed author Nicholas Dawidoff returned home and spent eight years reporting the deeper story of this injustice, and how it reveals enduring national problems. Like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc in her classic, Random Family, he has produced an immersive portrait of a community beset by inequality and gun violence. Dawidoff describes how Black families left the Jim Crow South for a neighborhood that offered uplift and mobility—and the subsequent heavy toll exacted by racism and deindustrialization. He chronicles a sensitive child’s coming of age amid police coercion and adult prison. He tells the dramatic story of how a true-believing lawyer helped to win the man’s release—and the heartbreaking challenges he and other formerly incarcerated people face on reentry into society.