Wellness from Death Row: Staying Human in a Place Built for Death

Paul Everett has spent more than two decades on death row. He has no gym, no kitchen, no freedom of movement and no certain future. He is also, by any honest measure, one of the most psychologically well people you will ever encounter.

This book is his account of how that is possible - and why it matters to you.

Wellness from Death Row is not a book about incarceration. It is a book about what genuine wellness actually requires when everything optional has been stripped away. Drawing on hundreds of hours of conversation between Paul and his longtime spiritual advisor Jeff Hood, it examines what it takes to keep the body capable, the mind engaged, the heart connected and the spirit intact when your circumstances are doing everything they can to prevent it.

What they found is both surprising and practical: the practices that hold under the most extreme conditions a human being can face require no equipment, no income, no favorable circumstances and no ideal conditions. They require only the decision to practice them - repeated daily, in the life you actually have.

If these practices work in a six-by-nine cell on death row, they will work wherever you are.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Paul Everett has been on death row for more than two decades, incarcerated for a crime he maintains he did not commit. In that time he has built an interior life of remarkable depth - developing practices of physical discipline, creative expression, spiritual inquiry and sustained human connection that have kept him whole in conditions designed to produce the opposite. He writes, corresponds with people across the world and continues to fight for his exoneration. Wellness from Death Row is his first book.

Jeff Hood is a theologian, activist and spiritual advisor who has spent years accompanying people through the hardest passages of their lives - on death row, in prisons and in communities confronting systemic injustice. He has written extensively on faith, suffering and the radical demands of human dignity. Wellness from Death Row is the fruit of countless hours of conversation with Paul Everett.

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a theologian and spiritual advisor to death row inmates nationwide. He has accompanied eleven men to their executions and was the first spiritual advisor to be present for a nitrogen hypoxia execution. Rev. Hood has been profiled widely, including in the Rolling Stone documentary The Spiritual Advisor. He is the Founder of Execution Intervention Project.