Contains interviews with 18 life-sentence prisoners in America, who are regarded as dangerous and violent with no chance of release. There are also interviews with the relatives of the criminals - scarred forever, like the offenders, by the "violence of our lives". Among those interviewed were a man who spent three years on Death Row awaiting execution, and another who was strapped in the electric chair before being reprieved; a pastor of a revivalist church in the Deep South who became a born-gain fundamentalist while in prison; a former prostitute who murdered her pimp and set fire to his body; a woman lawyer who shot dead the drug dealer with whom she was living when she was an addict herself; a personnel manager now out of prison on parole after serving 17 years for a street-brawl stabbing; and many others, men and women, black and white, four of whom are regarded as so dangerous and violent that they are incarcerated in maximum security prisons with no chance of ever being released.