New York, N.Y. St. Martin's Press, 2002. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. xx, 284 pages. Includes Acknowledgments, Introduction, Prologue. Bibliography. Notes. Index. Sasha Abramsky (born 4 April 1972) is a British-born Jewish freelance journalist and author who now lives in the United States. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, New York, The Village Voice, and Rolling Stone. He is a senior fellow at the American liberal think tank Demos, and a lecturer in the University of California, Davis's University Writing Program. He received a B.A. from Balliol College, Oxford in politics, philosophy and economics in 1993. He then traveled to the United States, where he earned a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.[1][4] In 2000, he received a Crime and Communities Media Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations. This work weaves together the story of the growth of the American prison system over the past quarter century primarily through the story of Ochoa, a career criminal who grew up in the barrios of post-World War II Los Angeles. Ochoa, who had a long history of nonviolent crimes committed to fund his drug habit, and who cycled in and out of prison since the late 1960's, is a perfect example of how perennial misfits, rather than blood-soaked violent criminals, make up the majority of America's prisoners. Through the stories of Ochoa, Wilson, and others, the author explores in devastating detail how the public has been manipulated into supporting mass incarceration during a period when crime rates have been steadily falling. More