The Cutting Four-Piece: Crime And Tragedy In An Era Of Prison-Overcrowding

Literary Nonfiction. Prison culture is an entity that feeds itself with rage, indifference and the force of addiction. It is a culture that's born in the streets, germinates behind bars, and then flows back into neighborhoods as ongoing cycles of victimization. The U.S. currently has the most overcrowded prisons in the world; some states are combating the legal and political fallout from this reality by enacting new experiments for handling criminals. But behind the clichéd expressions from lawmakers, oversimplified narratives from officials and fragmented reporting by the media, truths around America's justice system lie out of sight for most citizens, purposefully hidden behind curtains of overwhelming failure. Many who work within the system understand its dysfunction comes not only from the confusing nature of criminality, but also from laws tied more to bureaucratic advantage and financial gain than the truth of what is happening in the streets. In THE CUTTING FOUR-PIECE, award- winning journalist Scott Thomas Anderson builds on his years as a newspaper crime reporter to probe the link between prison overcrowding, criminal thinking, addiction, mental illness and policy born from political exploitation.