Doing Time is the compelling, true-to-life story of a young woman, Annabel Lee, who is wrongly convicted and imprisoned for a crime committed by her wayward husband. Beginning before her birth, the story opens in the rural American South of the1950s, and tracks the brutal relationship into which Annabel Lee is born. As she grows, Annabel Lee cannot escape the cycle of violence and abuse that surrounds her. Naively, she elopes with her teenaged lover in the vain hope for an escape from her cruel past, only to discover that she has entered upon an equally harrowing stint in a women's prison. In the unlikely fellowship behind bars, and through her relationships with inmates, staff and particularly the prison's chaplain, Annabel Lee courageously moves from the scarred existence as a victim to the life of a survivor.
Filled with the local color of life in rural North Carolina between the 1950s and 1970s, Doing Time is a poignantan-and at times humorous-story of multi-generational trauma and abuse, and the journey of the human spirit to healing and redemption.

Jack Lawson grew up in North Carolina. As an ordained minister he worked as a prison chaplain in North Carolina and Ohio, and later served as a parish minister in the US and the United Kingdom. After earning a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible, he taught both ministerial candidates and lay people in the English counties of Kent and Norfolk. After leaving parish ministry in 1997, Jack worked for the Countryside Agency, focusing on rural economic regeneration and managing a European Social Fund grant between Kent and Nord-Pas-de-Calais. In the process he developed an intense love of France and the French people. Later, Jack spent more than 12 years as training and development officer for the Methodist Church in East Anglia. Jack is married to Chris, a former mental health specialist who worked with children and families in the UK. They reside in Lower Normandy, France.