Unreasonable Women

Three Stories of Self-Defense, Wrongful Imprisonment, and Extraordinary Survival

De: Justine van der Leun

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

When award-winning journalist Justine van der Leun first reported on the issue of criminalized survival, she was astonished to see how women were being imprisoned for protecting themselves against abuse. She wondered how often survivors are targeted for prosecution. To find out, she began an intensive, years-long investigation—traveling coast to coast and collecting more than a thousand personal accounts from women’s prisons.

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun tells the propulsive, shocking, and intimate stories of three extraordinary women, caught in the direst circumstances, who had to kill to survive. Tanisha is a Michigan sex worker and fledgling entrepreneur determined to help detectives solve a cold case, whatever the consequences. Jema is a softhearted factory worker from Missouri, struggling to keep her family together as she navigates an increasingly dangerous relationship. TC is a bold Californian trying, along with her mother, to escape generations of trauma—and a toxic family environment. Each woman was abused in childhood, only to find that abuse replicated in adulthood, until they were ultimately forced to make an impossible choice.

A work of literary reportage that feels like the most dynamic crime novel, Unreasonable Women is the result of seven years of intensive, unprecedented research and on-the-ground reporting in prisons across the United States. 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 failings. It is also the moving story of three women who find hope and humanity in the unlikeliest of places.

©2026 Justine van der Leun (P)2026 HarperCollins Publishers