Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop Small Sale
Shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks. Don’t miss out—purchases support local bookstores.
Shop the sale
Limited-time offer
Get two free audiobooks!
Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.
Sign up todayNo Human Contact
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreIn 1983, Thomas Silverstein and Clayton Fountain, both serving life sentences at the U.S. Prison in Marion, Illinois, separately murdered two correction officers on the same day. The Bureau of Prisons condemned both men to the severest punishment that could legally be imposed, one created specifically for them. It was unofficially called "no human contact."
Each initially spent nine months in a mattress-sized cell where the lights burned twenty-four hours a day. They were clothed only in boxer shorts, completely sealed off from the outside world with only their minds to occupy their time. Fountain turned to religion and endured twenty-one-years before dying alone of natural causes. Silverstein became a skilled artist and lasted thirty-six years, longer than any other American prisoner in isolation.
Pete Earley—the only journalist to be granted face-to-face access with Silverstein—examines profound questions at the heart of our justice system. Were Silverstein and Fountain born bad? Or were they twisted by abusive childhoods? Did incarceration offer them a chance of rehabilitation—or force them to commit increasingly heinous crimes? No Human Contact elicits a uniquely deep and uncomfortable understanding of the crimes committed, the use of solitary confinement, and the reality of life, redemption, and death behind prison walls.
Pete Earley is a mental health advocate, journalist, and New York Times bestselling author of fiction and nonfiction books, including The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize finalist Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness. A former Washington Post reporter, Earley has appeared five times before the U.S. Congress to testify about the need for mental health reform, has spoken in forty-nine states, and addressed legislators in four foreign countries. He serves on the board of the Corporation for Supportive Housing, which finances projects to eliminate homelessness. He writes regularly for USA Today and the Washington Post about mental health issues.
Rich Miller has been a storyteller since he was a kid. When he was around ten, he turned the tables on the parents that had instilled a love of books in him: He started reading to his family after dinner every night (his favorites were The Lemonade Trick and The Big Joke Game, by Scott Corbett, but Encyclopedia Brown stories were a big hit as well). Later in life, he found out that people liked having stories acted out for them. He's performed onstage in everything from Shakespeare to Damn Yankees to August: Osage County, and starred in the indie feature Ocatilla Flat. And now he's acting out stories in front of a microphone. Except for when he's dodging Tucson drivers on his bicycle, or finding the next great Happy Hour locale.
Stock up with our Shop Small Sale!
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks