A groundbreaking new take on the American justice system from one of its unknown revolutionaries, offering a powerful new vision of responsibility, punishment, and repair, for readers of No Visible Bruises and Just Mercy.

Elizabeth Vartkessian works with criminal defense teams as a mitigation specialist. She isn't part of an Innocence Project; her clients are legally guilty, often of terrible crimes. Rather, her job is to spend hundreds of hours per case talking to the parents, siblings, teachers, and neighbors of a defendant, situating their crimes in context. Her unique experience has taught her that when personal or generational trauma enters the body, it finds its way out eventually, sometimes through violence. She contends that we cannot hold her clients solely responsible for their actions, nor can we continue to stomach harsh penalties that deny real justice to perpetrators and victims alike.

As founder and director of nonprofit mitigation team Advancing Real Change Inc., Vartkessian's life's work has been to discover how her clients end up where they are and how their trajectories could have been different. In this book, she weaves powerful, gripping stories from her extraordinary career into an inspiring argument for dignity in American justice.

Amidst the Trump administration's record-high executions and calls to expand the use of the death penalty after decades of progress, The Deserving is required reading for a dangerous new era of rollbacks. Vartkessian offers a compelling, hope-filled vision of how true rehabilitation, instead of retribution, would benefit us all.