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Crime
The Big Red Book
As Isaac Thomas walked jauntily down the bright, wide sidewalk at midday, he felt the weight of the book against his thigh, his wrist, the palm of his hand.
January 1995Law And Order
The most-feared policeman in the county, three-strikes defendants, an unforgettable Marshall
January 1995Six Days
The investigator from the department of mental health, Mr. D., called yesterday to tell me that the woman who seduced me after my stay on the K-4 unit a dozen years ago has been suspended from work for six days.
September 1994Raised By Cats
I took a deep breath. Whenever the ground is expecting, I like to walk. I can feel it reach right up through my legs to meet the sky. The blood of everything rises to meet the tension of the coming clouds before a good rain.
September 1994Holding Our Power
An Interview With Malidoma Patrice Somé
The indigenous world is not interested in the show of power. It is interested in respecting the source of the power. This respect is kept alive by camouflage; the power is protected by hiding it. An elder who has the power to create a light hole — a gateway you can jump through into another galaxy — is not interested in using that power to impress people. He would not use that power to show off.
August 1994Shame
After fourteen years of yard-walking a life sentence, Broadus Creek wore the mask of a traveler, implacably intent upon his route but thoroughly fortified against destination.
May 1994My Day In Court
I’d rather be at my desk, shuffling my own papers. But a friend confided recently that he couldn’t abide self-important types who considered themselves too busy for jury service.
April 1994Sunbeams
March 1994If Rosa Parks had moved to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Idle Speed
A Prison Journal
I became a crook, endorsing checks made out to the stock brokerage I worked for, putting the funds in my checking account, trading heavily in stock options — always telling myself everyone would be paid off handsomely, and no one would ever know.
March 1994A Brutal Sadness
Capital Punishment And The Politics Of Vengeance
Robert Alton Harris was gassed to death at sunrise on April 21, 1992, the first person to be executed by the state of California in twenty-five years. The execution ended fourteen years of legal wrangling over Harris’s fate, capped by four overnight stays of execution.
August 1993
