In the Belly of the Beast
Letters From Prison
Written by Jack Henry Abbott

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 2, 1991
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-73237-2 (0-679-73237-3)

While writing The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer received a letter from Jack Henry Abbott, a convict, in which Abbott offered to educate him in the realities of life in a maximum security prison. This book organizes Abbott's classic letters to Mailer, which evoke his infernal vision of the prison nightmare.



"Astonishing...a work... Read more >

Tokyo Vice
An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan
Written by Jake Adelstein

Format: Hardcover, 352 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: October 13, 2009
Price: $26.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-37879-8 (0-307-37879-9)

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club: a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.

At nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a life of crime... Read more >

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Written by John Berendt

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 28, 1999
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75152-6 (0-679-75152-1)

Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares. John Berendt’s sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative... Read more >

God of the Rodeo
The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison
Written by Daniel Bergner

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: October 5, 1999
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-43553-8 (0-345-43553-2)

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

God of the Rodeo, by journalist Daniel Bergner, takes readers inside a world where no writer before has ventured so deeply–the life of a maximum-security state penitentiary. Bergner first traveled to Angola State Prison in Louisiana to cover the prison’s inmate rodeo, a... Read more >

Courtroom 302
A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse
Written by Steve Bogira

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 14, 2006
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75206-6 (0-679-75206-4)

Steve Bogira’s riveting book takes us into the heart of America’s criminal justice system. Courtroom 302 is the story of one year in one courtroom in Chicago’s Cook County Criminal Courthouse, the busiest felony courthouse in the country.

We see the system through the eyes of the men and women who... Read more >

The Turnaround
How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic
Written by William Bratton and Peter Knobler

Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: January 20, 1998
Price: $28.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-45251-5 (0-679-45251-6)

When Bill Bratton was sworn in as New York City's police commissioner in 1994, he made what many considered a bold promise: The NYPD would fight crime in every borough...and win.  It seemed foolhardy; even everybody knows you can't win the war on crime.  But Bratton delivered.  In an extraordinary twenty-seven months, serious crime... Read more >

All God's Children
The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence
Written by Fox Butterfield

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 8, 2008
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-28033-6 (0-307-28033-0)

A timely reissue of Fox Butterfield’s masterpiece, All God’s Children, a searing examination of the caustic cumulative effect of racism and violence over 5 generations of black Americans.

Willie Bosket is a brilliant, violent man who began his criminal career at age five; his slaying of two subway riders at fifteen... Read more >

Newjack
Guarding Sing Sing
Written by Ted Conover

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 12, 2001
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72662-0 (0-375-72662-4)

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction

Ted Conover, the intrepid author of Coyotes, about the world of illegal Mexican immigrants, spent a year as a prison guard at Sing Sing. Newjack, his account of that experience, is a milestone in American journalism: a book that casts... Read more >

Contempt of Court
The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism
Written by Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 20, 2001
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-72082-3 (0-385-72082-3)

In 1906, Ed Johnson was the innocnet black man found guilty of the brutal rape of Nevada Taylor, a white woman, and sentenced to die in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Two black lawyers, not even part of the original defense, appealed to the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, and the stay... Read more >

Justice
Crimes, Trials, and Punishments
Written by Dominick Dunne

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: May 14, 2002
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-609-80963-1 (0-609-80963-6)

For more than two decades, Vanity Fair has published Dominick Dunne’s brilliant, revelatory chronicles of the most famous crimes, trials, and punishments of our time. Here, in one volume, are Dominick Dunne’s mesmerizing tales of justice denied and justice affirmed. Whether writing of Claus von Bülow’s romp through two trials; the... Read more >

The Hot House
Life Inside Leavenworth Prison
Written by Pete Earley

Format: Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Bantam
On Sale: February 1, 1993
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-553-56023-7 (0-553-56023-9)

The most dreaded facility in the prison system because of its fierce population, Leavenworth is governed by ruthless clans competing for dominance. Here Earley unabashedly explores the characters and forces at work in Leavenworth, nicknamed 'The Hot House' for its lack of proper ventilation, and, as a result, reveals the state... Read more >

Discipline & Punish
The Birth of the Prison
Written by Michel Foucault

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 25, 1995
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75255-4 (0-679-75255-2)

Using academic works and legal documents dating back to the early 1700s, Foucault constructs a history of punishment, beginning with the spectacle of corporal punishment and public execution and ending with the institution of the modern prison.  He argues that over the course of approximately eighty years (between the torture and execution... Read more >

The Book of Spies
An Anthology of Literary Espionage
Edited by Alan Furst
Introduction by Alan Furst

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: June 8, 2004
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75959-8 (0-375-75959-X)

An anthology of the world’s best literary espionage, selected by a contemporary master of the genre, Alan Furst.

Here is an extraordinary collection of work from some of the finest novelists of the twentieth century. Inspired by the politics of tyranny or war, each of these writers chose the base elements of... Read more >

Prisoners
A Story of Friendship and Terror
Written by Jeffrey Goldberg

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 15, 2008
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72670-5 (0-375-72670-5)

During the first Palestinian uprising in 1990, Jeffrey Goldberg – an American Jew – served as a guard at the largest prison camp in Israel. One of his prisoners was Rafiq, a rising leader in the PLO. Overcoming their fears and prejudices, the two men began a dialogue that, over more... Read more >

The Innocent Man

Written by John Grisham

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Delta
On Sale: November 20, 2007
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-34091-5 (0-385-34091-5)

In 1982, a 21-year-old waitress in Ada, Oklahoma was raped and murdered. For five years the police could not solve the crime. They wound up charging former local baseball star Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz with capital murder. Despite the fact that the prosecution’s case was built on junk... Read more >

Legal Lynching
The Death Penalty and America's Future
Written by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Bruce Shapiro

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: January 7, 2003
Price: $12.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-72211-7 (0-385-72211-7)

The death penalty is one of the most hotly contested issues in America today. Evidence continues to mount that many innocent people have been executed or are currently living on death row, and that minority groups and the poor suffer from a shoddy public defense system and discriminatory application of capital... Read more >

Race, Crime, and the Law

Written by Randall Kennedy

Format: Trade Paperback, 560 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 31, 1998
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70184-9 (0-375-70184-2)

Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Grand Prize

In this groundbreaking, powerfully reasoned, lucid work, Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy uncovers the long-standing failure of the justice system to protect blacks from criminals; engages the debate over the wisdom and legality of using racial criteria in jury selection; analyzes... Read more >

Hate Crime
The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas
Written by Joyce King

Format: Hardcover, 240 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: May 28, 2002
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-42132-7 (0-375-42132-7)

On June 7, 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a forty-nine-year-old black man, was dragged to his death while chained to the back of a pickup truck driven by three young white men. It happened just outside of Jasper, a sleepy East Texas logging town that, within twenty-four hours of the discovery of... Read more >

Guilty by Reason of Insanity
A Psychiatrist Explores the Minds of Killers
Written by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Ph.D.

Format: Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Ivy Books
On Sale: May 1, 1999
Price: $7.99
ISBN: 978-0-8041-1887-3 (0-8041-1887-6)

A psychiatrist and an internationally recognized expert on violence, Dorothy Otnow Lewis has spent the last quarter century studying the minds of killers. Among the notorious murderers she has examined are Ted Bundy, Arthur Shawcross, and Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon.

Now she shares her groundbreaking discoveries–and... Read more >

Prisons: Inside the New America
From Vernooykill Creek to Abu Ghraib
Written by David Matlin
Foreword by Ishmael Reed

Format: Trade Paperback, 168 pages
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
On Sale: March 28, 2005
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-55643-549-2 (1-55643-549-5)

This powerful exposè reveals how America's ailing prison system undermines the public trust. For ten years, David Matlin taught at a maximum-security prison, a daily confrontation with the nature of society, crime, and violence. Based on his experiences, this book examines the history of prisons in the United States and shows... Read more >

Makes Me Wanna Holler
A Young Black Man in America
Written by Nathan Mc Call

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 31, 1995
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-74070-4 (0-679-74070-8)

In this autobiography Washington Post reporter McCall looks back on his journey from troubled youth to professional journalist and shows that the easy answers to why kids go wrong--poverty, terrible home life, lack of education--do not always apply. "The problems among us," he writes of acquaintances who ended up addicted, imprisoned... Read more >

Banished Knowledge
Facing Childhood Injuries
Written by Alice Miller

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 1, 1991
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-26762-5 (0-385-26762-2)

In direct opposition to the Freudian drive theory, Alice Miller in Banished Knowledge argues that children, at birth, are inherently good, and she traces all forms of criminal deeds to past mistreatments.

Read more >

Executioner's Current
Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and the Invention of the Electric Chair
Written by Richard Moran

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 11, 2003
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72446-6 (0-375-72446-X)

In this amazing story of high stakes competition between two titans, Richard Moran shows how the electric chair developed not out of the desire to be more humane but through an effort by one nineteenth-century electric company to discredit the other.

In 1882, Thomas Edison ushered in the “age of electricity” when... Read more >

Birth of a Nation'hood
Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case
Written by Toni Morrison

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: February 4, 1997
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-75893-8 (0-679-75893-3)

Co-edited and introduced by Toni Morrison, Birth of a Nation'hood illuminates one of the grimmest--and most revealing--moments of recent American history: the O.J. Simpson case. As they relate to the scandal, the issues of race, sex, violence, money, and the media are refracted through the lens of twelve powerful essays, specially... Read more >

Serial Killers

Written by Joel Norris

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: July 1, 1989
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-26328-3 (0-385-26328-7)

Through extensive research and interviews with five notorious serial killers, author Joel Norris demonstrates that serial killers have specific biological and genetic makeups that can be identified as early as five years of age. A compelling read for both the curious layman and the concerned professional. Read more >