A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolutionIn the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the pres...

The sordid, #1 New York Times bestselling true crime story of adultery, addiction, gambling debt, and murder in a privileged suburban town—from author and journalist Joe McGinniss.The Marshalls were the model family of Tom’s River, New Jersey, living the American dream and seemingly in possession of all that money could buy. Rob Marshall, a successful insurance broker, was the big breadwinner, king of the country club set. Maria Marshall was his stunningly...

Here is the first full telling of the most colorful and famous law enforcers of our time. For years, the Texas Rangers have been historical figures shrouded in myth. Charles M. Robinson III has sifted through the tall tales to reach the heart of this storied organization. The Men Who Wear the Star details the history of the Rangers, from their beginnings, spurred by Stephen Austin, and their formal organization in 1835, to the gangster era with Bonnie and Clyde, and on thr...

Near MissIn May, 1988, in Everett, Washington, four-year-old Feather Rahier disappeared while playing outside after dinner. Her frantic cries drew Feather's mother to the dark garage that was home to Richard Matthew Clark. Clark had stolen the child, bound and gagged her, and begun to undress her. Only at the last instant was the little girl saved by her mother's desperate intervention. The next victim wouldn't be so fortunate.Without A Trace

Paddy Armstrong was one of four people falsely convicted of The Guildford Bombing in 1975. He spent fifteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Today, as a husband and father, life is wonderfully ordinary, but the memory of his ordeal lives on. Here, for the first time and with unflinching candour, he lays bare the experiences of those years and their aftermath. Life after Life is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of forgiveness. It reminds us of th...

This true story of race and injustice in a small west Texas town "resembles . . . a modern day To Kill a Mockingbird -- or would, that is, if the novel were a true story and Atticus had won" (New York Times Book Review)In the summer of 1999, in the tiny west Texas town of Tulia, thirty-nine people, almost all of them black, were arrested and charged with dealing powdered cocaine. At trial, the prosecution relied almost solely on the uncorroborated...

For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder. The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states...

On the morning of 7 March 1997, the bodies of two elderly female patients were discovered in their sheltered accommodation at Grangegorman Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin.It would be a further 16 years before Mark Nash was convicted of the notorious Grangegorman murders, but not before Dean Lyons, an innocent man, spent months in prison for a crime he did not commit, only to tragically die of a heroin overdose before his name was cleared. Here Alan Bailey, a retired member of the Garda Síoc...

A distinctive feature of the conflict in Northern Ireland over the past forty years has been the way Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries have policed their own communities. This has mainly involved the violent punishment of petty criminals involved in joyriding and other types of antisocial behavior. Between 1973 and 2007, more than 5,000 nonmilitary shootings and assaults were attributed to paramilitaries punishing their own people. But despite the risk of severe punishment, young pett...

Since the early 1990s, thanks to inflamed rhetoric in the media about “superpredators” and a wave of get-tough-on-crime laws, the number of juveniles in prison has risen by 35 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and their placement in adult prison has increased by 208 percent, according to a 2007 survey by the Campaign for Youth. Since 1992, every state except Nebraska has passed laws making it easier to prosecute youth under eighteen as adults, and most states have legal...

In the tumultuous years following the Civil War, violence and lawlessness plagued the state of Texas, often overwhelming the ability of local law enforcement to maintain order. In response, Reconstruction-era governor Edmund J. Davis created a statewide police force that could be mobilized whenever and wherever local authorities were unable or unwilling to control lawlessness. During its three years (1870–1873) of existence, however, the Texas State Police was reviled as an arm of the Radi...

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from early crypto-Jewish settlers in New Spain. After extensive research and hundreds of interviews, Hordes concluded that there was, in New Mexico and the Southwest, a Sephardic legacy derived from th...