A popular backdrop for numerous movies, Sing Sing, or "the Big House," has been a site of both controversy and reform. The history of Sing Sing dates back to 1825, when warden Elam Lynds brought one hundred inmates to begin construction of the prison "up the river" on the banks of the Hudson. The marble quarry that supplied the building material for the prison was located in an area that was once home to the Sint Sink, a Native American tribe whose name means "stone upon stone." Prison lif...

Putnam County, located fifty miles north of New York City and one hundred miles south of Albany, was an important site during the American Revolution and the Civil War. With the advent of the railroad, the county became an important hub for travelers heading to Boston and points north. By the mid-1800s, thousands of workers immigrated here to undertake the enormous task of building dams and reservoirs for New York City�s drinking water. A popular vacation destination of past decades, Putna...

After more than twenty years in prison, Adnan Syed's murder conviction was overturned, and he was finally set free. Rabia Chaudry's New York Times bestseller and award-winner Adnan's Story reveals how the case was mishandled and became the subject of Sarah Koenig's Peabody Award-winning podcast Serial.In early 2000, Adnan Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a high scho...

Get both of Dr. William Wright’s best-selling, award-winning books in a singlevolume!Maximum Insecurity chronicles Wright’s true-life metamorphosis from suburbanear surgeon to life as the sole physician at Colorado’s maximum-security prison.Jailhouse Doc follows Wright’s transition from prison medicine to running theclinic at the county jail. Should be easy right? Not on your life.Told with a humor and biting wit, both books reveal the real insi...

Growing up in Glasgow in the 1930s, Roy Archibald Hall was a natural thief. After moving to London, he became a familiar figure in the capital's underground gay scene. Due to his lucrative criminal career, he led an extravagant lifestyle - though eventually he was arrested and spent the majority of the next two decades of his life, in a cell. Upon release from prison in 1975, he returned to Scotland and ound employment as a butler. He was joined by David Wright, a former lover from prison,...

From the author of the national bestseller Dead Man Walking comes a brave and fiercely argued new book that tests the moral edge of the debate on capital punishment: What if we’re executing innocent men? Two cases in point are Dobie Gillis Williams, an indigent black man with an IQ of 65, and Joseph Roger O’Dell. Both were convicted of murder on flimsy evidence (O’Dell’s principal accuser was a jailhouse informant who later recanted his testimony). Both were executed in spite of n...

A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man's lifeAt the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts-a good student from a lower- middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a "certifiable" offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year s...

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...

Benjamin D'Amore abused his wife for the last time on November 29, 1949. That night, his sons John and Nicholas exacted revenge and executed Benjamin with a shotgun and deer rifle. The trial that followed was unlike many before it. Two psychiatrists diagnosed the brothers with "catathymic crisis," which inhibited their judgment during the crime. But despite the defendants' guilty plea, an all-female jury acquitted them. Thomas Deitman and Dawn D'Amore Yankanich unravel the horrific events ...

John V. Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City in 1965. But that year’s mayoral campaign will forever be known as the Buckley campaign. As a candidate,” Joseph Alsop conceded, Buckley was cleverer and livelier than either of his rivals.” And Murray Kempton concluded that The process which coarsens every other man who enters it has only refined Mr. Buckley.”The Unmaking of a Mayor is a time capsule of the political atmosphere of America in the spring of 1965, diagnos...

An in-depth account of the Civil War people and events that left their mark on the city at the heart of the Union, shaping its historic legacy.When the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861, Washington, DC, was a small, essentially Southern city. The capital rapidly transformed as it prepared for invasion—army camps sprung up in Foggy Bottom, the Navy Yard on Anacostia was a beehive of activity, and even the Capitol was pressed into service as a barracks....

Harlem is one of the best-known neighborhoods in the U.S., and it's also one of the nation's most vibrant cultural hubs. Though its reputation has been tarnished at times by economic depressions and crime, its loyal community has created a unique history and culture. Much of this history took place during the twentieth century, which included an influx African American residents, an unparalleled artistic, literary and musical movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, deteriorating economic...