This is a book of trust. To all the people who taught me with the stories of their lives—the people who fill these pages and the many more who fill my thinking—thank you for your trust and your teaching. And thank you to the scientists and therapists who gave their time so generously to educate […]

УУ HEN she was a girl, laura and her friends rode their horses through the Pennsylvania countryside, rode Western and bareback, rode through woods and cornfields. The woods seemed to belong to no one. The cornfields churned around them like windswept lakes. They galloped through the afternoons till it was time for dinner. Her father […]

They returned from the field of tall grass to the faces of the others. Liddle sometimes asked them for introductions, though the faces stayed mostly the same. They went around the circle. “I was convicted of two counts of sexual assault four, and three counts of risk of injury to a minor, and enticing a […]

/Ifter his metamorphosis, roy sat, one morning each week, in a windowless room It had a blue industrial carpet, a blackboard, a circle of brown cushioned office chairs. A faint hum came from the air ducts. To reach the roomfromthe waiting area, on the second floor of the probation building, Roy and the other men […]

.During the abu ghraib prison scandal, the Baroness received a flood of phone calls. The photographs that ran in the newspapers and on television, the images and descriptions of torture, especially the picture of an Iraqi standing on a box with a hood over his head and electrical cables running to his hands, stirred a […]

J acob miller loved Toronto. he thought of it every day. He was American, and lived in a snowy American city, but a Canadian flag, with its broad bars of red and its red maple leaf, hung in his home office. A printout of the flag, on a sheet of computer paper, was taped to […]

“What,” the people I write about often ask, “are you doing here with me?” I heard the question in Angola Prison, Louisiana’s maximum security penitentiary, where I followed the lives of men sentenced to stay locked up until their deaths, with no chance of parole. I heard it in Sierra Leone, in West Africa, where […]