Unreasonable Women - Three Stories of Violence, Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival

By: Justine van der Leun

Published by HarperCollins Publishers, 2026

A groundbreaking account of how the legal system punishes those it purports to protect, told through the stories of three unforgettable women

When award-winning journalist Justine van der Leun began looking into the issue of criminalized survival, she was astonished to see how women were being imprisoned for protecting themselves against abuse. This sparked an intensive, yearslong investigation to determine how often survivors are targeted for prosecution, during which she collected more than a thousand personal accounts from women's prisons across America.

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun tells the propulsive, shocking, and intimate stories of three extraordinary women who, finding themselves caught in the direst circumstances, had to kill to survive. Tanisha is a spirited Michigan mother determined to help authorities solve a cold case, whatever the consequences. Jema is a softhearted Missouri factory worker struggling to keep her family together while navigating a dangerous relationship. TC is a bold Californian trying to escape generations of trauma and a toxic family environment. In each case, a woman's childhood abuse was replicated in adulthood until they were ultimately forced to make an impossible choice.

A work of literary reportage that reads like the most dynamic crime novel, Unreasonable Women is the result of seven years of unprecedented research and on-the-ground reporting in U.S. prisons. It is the story of women and violence in America--and a wake-up call about a system that would rather condemn a woman to life behind bars than face its own failings. It is also the moving narrative of three women who find hope and humanity in the unlikeliest of places.