In this collection of wise and fiercely poignant essays, Mansfield B. Frazier plays the role of a latter-day Virgil, inviting us to descend with him into the modern American inferno. We learn about the wages of racism and its lingering effects within the very system of justice commissioned to eradicate it.

And as we journey with Frazier into the innermost circle of America's beleaguered underclass, we are invited to sojourn in the dismal land inhabited by those who are now part of our incarcerated sub-culture.

Not content to leave us despairing, Frazier offers reasoned solutions to the problems accounting for our seemingly unstoppable spiral toward inner-city anarchy. To see hope restored to those corners of America where it has long been presumed extinct; to offer practical and potentially successful means of dealing with the problems of crime and drug use; and to encourage a rapprochement between alienated groups in American society: these are Mansfield Frazier's ultimate ambitions in From Behind the Wall.