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

AMERICA currently retains the variation of housing nearly one-quarter of the world’s prison population. But our reliance on mass incarceration, Fox Butterfield argues, misses the intractable actuality: As few as 5 percent of families about IN MY OWN Father’s House: A FRESH Look at of How Crime Runs in the Family take into account half of all crime, and only 10 percent take into account two-thirds. In introducing us to the Bogle family, the writer invites us to comprehend crime with this eye-opening new light. He chronicles the malignant legacy of criminality exceeded from parents to children, grandchildren, as well as great-grandchildren. Examining the long history of the Bogles, a white family, Butterfield presents a revelatory take a look at criminality that pushes us to disentangle competition from our suggestions about criminal offense and, in doing this, strikes in the centre of our deepest stereotypes. And he makes obvious how these fresh insights are leading to fundamentally different efforts at reform. Along with his empathic insight and profound knowledge of criminology, Butterfield presents us both indelible tale of 1 family’s transgressions and tribulations, and an entirely new way to understand crime in America.