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  • Published: 9 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9780525643005
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00

In My Father's House

A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family





From the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist: a pathbreaking examination of our huge crime and incarceration problem that looks at the influence of the family--specifically one Oregon family with a generations-long legacy of lawlessness.

The United States currently holds the distinction of housing nearly one-quarter of the world's prison population. But our reliance on mass incarceration, Fox Butterfield argues, misses the intractable reality: As few as 5 percent of families account for half of all crime, and only 10 percent account for two-thirds. In introducing us to the Bogle family, the author invites us to understand crime in this eye-opening new light. He chronicles the malignant legacy of criminality passed from parents to children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. Examining the long history of the Bogles, a white family, Butterfield offers a revelatory look at criminality that forces us to disentangle race from our ideas about crime and, in doing so, strikes at the heart of our deepest stereotypes. And he makes clear how these new insights are leading to fundamentally different efforts at reform. With his empathic insight and profound knowledge of criminology, Butterfield offers us both the indelible tale of one family's transgressions and tribulations, and an entirely new way to understand crime in America.

  • Published: 9 October 2018
  • ISBN: 9780525643005
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00

Praise for In My Father's House

Praise for All God's Children:

  • "A heartbreaking and terrifying chronicle of violence passed from one African-American generation to the next." --The New Yorker

  • Anyone who lives in hope that we may one day better understand the mixture of psychological, historical, and social pathology that so dominates a large part of contemporary urban landscapes would do well to read Fox Butterfield's [book]." --The New York Review of Books
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