American Criminal Justice

In partnership with Texas Monthly, the following articles spotlighting true crime are now available in a bundle as an audio download: * "The Cheerleader Murder Plot" by Mimi Swartz, read by Pam Dougherty * "The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob" by Skip Hollandsworth, read by Bruce DuBose * "A Kiss Before...

The powerful account of one writer's unlikely friendship with his childhood bully, now the president of a motorcycle club in one of America's most dangerous cities. Once upon a time, Alex Abramovich and Trevor Latham were mortal enemies: miniature outlaws in a Long Island elementary school...

A generation before Brown v. Board of Education struck down America’s “separate but equal” doctrine, one Chinese family and an eccentric Mississippi lawyer fought for desegregation in one of the greatest legal battles never told On September 15, 1924, Martha Lum and her older sister Berda...

Extraordinarily powerful stories of ordinary people locked up for crimes they did not commit, and how they were freed against great odds. A nightmare from a thousand B-movies: a horrible crime is committed in your neighborhood, and the police knock at your door. A witness swears you are the...

Nearly five million men and women have served the United States as police officers. Only one has been executed for murder. They called it Satan’s Circus–a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the twentieth...

Desmond Meade was chosen as a MacArthur Fellow in 2021 The inspiring and eye-opening true story of one man’s undying belief in the power of a fully enfranchised nation. “You may think the right to vote is a small matter, and if you do, I would bet you have never had it taken away from you...

Today, seventy-three years after his death, journalists still tell tales of Charles E. Chapin. As city editor of Pulitzeras New York Evening World, Chapin was the model of the take-no-prisoners newsroom tyrant: he drove reporters relentlesslyaand kept his paper in the center ring of the circus...

In this disturbing yet elegant exposé of U.S. penitentiaries and their surrounding communities, Sasha Abramsky shows how American prisons have abandoned their long-held ideal of rehabilitation, often for political reasons. After surveying our current state of affairs-life sentences for...

Interweaving an insider’s account of the true crime saga driving Netflix sensation Making a Murderer with other controversial cases from his career, this powerful memoir from Steven Avery’s defense attorney reveals the flaws in America's criminal justice system and puts forth a provocative...

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime", and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to arms, bringing weapons and practices from the arena of war back home. The Punitive Turn in American Life offers a political and cultural history of the ways in which punishment and surveillance have moved to the center of American life and become imbued with militarized language and policies.

When The New Press, the Center for American Progress, and the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted Peoples and Family Movement issued a call for innovative reform ideas, over 300 currently and formerly incarcerated individuals responded. What We Know collects two dozen of their best suggestions, each of which proposes a policy solution derived from their own lived experience.

A history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first black officer. When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York City’s first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! Some of America’s most important founders have been erased from our history books. In the fight to restore the true meaning of the Constitution, their stories must be told. In the earliest days of our nation, a handful of unsung heroes—including women...

“A time capsule of adventuresome sleuthing [that] traces the contours of U. S. political history.” —The Washington Post The Los Angeles Times once called Terry Lenzner “one of the most powerful and dreaded private investigators in the world.” Since graduating from Harvard Law School...

“This isn’t a story about black people—it’s a story about the Left’s agenda to patronize blacks and lie to everyone else.” For decades, the Left has been putting on a play with themselves as heroes in an ongoing civil rights move­ment—which they were mostly absent from at the...

Nearly five million men and women have served the United States as police officers. Only one has been executed for murder. They called it Satan’s Circus–a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the twentieth...

Trayvon Martin’s parents take readers beyond the news cycle with an account only they could give: the intimate story of a tragically foreshortened life and the rise of a movement. “A reminder—not only of Trayvon’s life and death but of the vulnerability of black lives in a country...

The true story behind the film AMERICAN HUSTLE The Sting Man is the amazing inside story of Mel Weinberg, one of the most fascinating fast-buck operators to ever live, and the incredible scandals he masterminded. Hustling his way from the streets of the Bronx to hawking bogus businesses...

He challenged the greatest empire on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades—and brought it to its knees. Empire of Blue Water is the real story of the pirates of the Caribbean. Henry Morgan, a twenty-year-old Welshman, crossed the Atlantic in 1655, hell-bent on making his fortune. Over the...

Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who gave up his corporate law salary to fight the good fight - until one day he was arrested on the street and charged with a crime he didn't commit. Here, Butler looks at places where ordinary citizens meet the justice system - as jurors, witnesses, and in encounters with the police - and explores what "doing the right thing" means in a corrupt system.