Killer Looks draws on the intersectionality of socioeconomic success, racial bias, the prison industry complex and the fallacy of attractiveness to get to the heart of how appearance and societal approval creates self-worth, and uncovers deeper truths of beauty bias, inherited racism, effective recidivism programs, and inequality. Michael Lewin, who ran a similar program at Sing-Sing prison in 1953. The program, funded by a $240,000 grant from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was led by Dr. In 1967, a three-year cosmetic surgery program set on Rikers Island saw recidivism rates drop 36% for surgically altered offenders. Read Killer Looks The Forgotten History of Plastic Surgery in Prisons by Zara Stone available from Rakuten Kobo. And, strange as it may sound, the criminologists were right: recidivism rates plummeted. In the beginning, this was a haphazard affair - applied inconsistently and unfairly to inmates, but entering the 1960s, a movement to scientifically quantify the long-term effect of such programs took hold. Zara Stone is an award-winning journalist who has written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine, Forbes, Cosmopolitan Magazine, VICE, OneZero, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The BBC, among other publications. From the 1920s up to the mid-1990s, half a million prison inmates across America, Canada, and the U.K willingly went under the knife, their tab picked up by the government. Killer Looks is the definitive story about the long-forgotten practice of providing free nose jobs, face-lifts, breast implants, and other physical alterations to prisoners, the idea being that by remodeling the face you remake the man. Expertly and rigorously researched, Killer Looks takes the reader through the little-known practice of testing surgeries on prisoners, the rise and fall of the rehabilitation movement, the. Author Zara Stone joins Melissa this week on The Book Break to discuss her novel, Killer Looks: The Forgotten History of Plastic Surgery in Prisons.

Killer Looks by Zara Stone