Itchy: The Autobiography of Street and Prison Legend David L. Brooks (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781985905351)

David "Itchy" Brooks, a legend on the streets of DC and inside prisons across the US, served life for the life he led--but a murder he didn't happen to commit. He struggled to remain principled in his unprincipled world, living and killing for his own set of morals. As the prison boxing coach and jailhouse lawyer, Itchy mentored young inmates to learn his lessons without paying his price. When a white criminal law professor shows up at Lorton Central, flagship of the nation's only all-Black prison system, searching for the code that governs this new, more violent generation, Itchy feels pressed to justify his life of crime--his claimed respect for the law, his treatment of women, and his sense of right and wrong.

Twelve years and hundreds of hours of these conversations have produced Itchy, a brutally honest, irony-laden, and deeply emotional self-portrait that helps explain street crime and its root causes. Pieced together in Itchy's own words, this dynamic saga of a brash and strangely principled outlaw makes us wonder: Would different early influences and circumstances have produced a leader society could celebrate rather than a killer it needed to incarcerate?