Book excerpt: A young middle-school vice principal is encouraged to join a prison volunteer program by the father of one of his students, an ex-con who has turned his life around. They arrive at South Carolina's Lieber Correctional Institution, and with very little preparation, the author finds himself admitted as a visitor to Death Row. He begins having personal conversations with the condemned inmates, and over the course of six different visits and numerous frank discussions, finds his beliefs about the death penalty, incarceration, and indeed the human condition--changed forever.