The brief history of this controversial and experimental women's prison posed questions about crime and rehabilitation that remain unresolved today.

A photographic and textual description of the heavily congested Tehachapi rail freight route in California.

Nineteen-year-old Burmah Adams, a hairdresser and former Santa Ana High School student, spent her honeymoon on a crime spree. She and her husband of less than one week, White, an ex-con, robbed at least twenty people in and around downtown L.A. at gunpoint over an eight-week period. But the worst of their crimes was the shooting of a popular elementary school teacher, Cora Withington, and a former publisher, Crombie Allen, who was teaching her how to drive his new car. A few days later, a watchful pair of patrolmen in a Westlake neighborhood called their detective colleagues at the Los Angeles Police Department; they had spotted a car that looked like one the duo had stolen days before. Two of these detectives dressed as mechanics and kept an eye on the apartment building until Burmah and Thomas appeared one afternoon. As police swarmed the building, Burmah tried to hurl herself out of a third–story window, while Thomas shot at officers and was immediately gunned down and killed. Blond Rattlesnake reveals the events that brought Adams and White together and details the crime spree they committed in the sweltering hot days and nights of Los Angeles in the height of the Great Depression. It describes the terror of citizens in their path and the outrage they directed at the female half of the duo. Politicians exploited Burmah’s incarceration and trial for their own purposes as the press battled for scoops about the “Blonde Rattlesnake” and created sensation while trying to make sense of her crimes.

THE VIVID, SCANDAL-FILLED STORY OF A SHREWD, RAGS-TO-RICHES MILLIONAIRESS AND THE RUTHLESS POLITICIAN WHO PURSUED HER, TOLD AGAINST THE EFFERVESCENT BACKDROP OF AMERICA’S GOLDEN CITY—SAN FRANCISCO. San Francisco, until the mid-1940s, was a city that lived by its own rules, fast and loose. Formed by the gold rush and destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, it served as a pleasure palace for the legions of men who sought their fortunes in the California foothills. For the women who followed, their only choice was to support, serve, or submit. Inez Burns was different. She put everyone to shame with her dazzling, calculated, stone-cold ambition. Born in the slums of San Francisco to a cigar-rolling alcoholic, Inez transformed herself into one of California’s richest women, becoming a notorious powerbroker, grand dame, and iconoclast. A stunning beauty with perfumed charm, she rose from manicurist to murderess to millionaire, seducing one man after another, bearing children out of wedlock, and bribing politicians and cops along the way to secure her place in the San Francisco firmament. Inez ruled with incandescent flair. She owned five hundred hats and a closet full of furs, had two small toes surgically removed to fit into stylish high heels, and had two ribs excised to accentuate her hourglass figure. Her presence was defined by couture dresses from Paris, red-carpet strutting at the San Francisco Opera, and a black Pierce-Arrow that delivered her everywhere. She threw outrageous parties on her sprawling, eight-hundred-acre horse ranch, a compound with servants, cooks, horse groomers, and trainers, where politicians, judges, attorneys, Hollywood moguls, and entertainers gamboled over silver fizzes. Inez was adored by the desperate women who sought her out—and loathed by the power-hungry men who plotted to destroy her. During a time when women risked their lives with predatory practitioners lurking in back alleys, Inez and her team of women, clad in crisp, white nurse’s uniforms, worked night and day in her elegantly appointed clinic, performing fifty thousand of the safest, most hygienic abortions available during a time when even the richest wives, Hollywood stars, and mistresses had few options when they found themselves with an unwanted pregnancy. Inez’s illegal business bestowed upon her power and influence—until a determined politician by the name of Edmund G. (Pat) Brown—the father of current California Governor Jerry Brown—used Inez to catapult his nascent career to national prominence. In The Audacity of Inez Burns, Stephen G. Bloom, the author of the bestselling Postville, reveals a jagged slice of lost American history. From Inez’s riveting tale of glamour and tragedy, he has created a brilliant, compulsively readable portrait of an unforgettable woman during a moment when America’s pendulum swung from compassion to criminality by punishing those who permitted women to control their own destinies.

In September 1996, fifty-three year old heroin addict Billy Ochoa was sentenced to 326 years in prison. His crime: committing $2100 worth of welfare fraud. Ochoa was sent to New Folsom supermax prison, joining thousands of other men who will spend the rest of their lives in California's teeming correctional facilities as a result of that state's tough Three Strikes law. His incarceration will cost over $20,000 a year until he dies. Hard Time Blues 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 L.A. Ochoa, who had a long history of non-violent crimes committed to fund his drug habit, 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. This is also the story of the burgeoning careers of politicians such as former California Governor Pete Wilson, who rose to power on the "crime issue." Wilson, whose grandfather was a cop murdered by drug-runners in early twentieth century Chicago, scored a stunning come-from-behind re-election victory in 1994. In so doing, he came to epitomize the 1990s tough-on-crime politician. Award-winning journalist Sasha Abramsky uses immersion reportage to bring alive the political forces that have led America's prison and jail population to increase more than four fold in the past twenty years. Through the stories of Ochoa, Wilson, and others, he explores in devastating detail how the public has been manipulated into supporting mass incarceration during a period when crime rates have been steadily falling. Hard Time Blues deftly explores the War on Drugs, the Rockefeller Laws, the growth of the SuperMax Prisons, the climate of fear that led to laws such as Truth-in-Sentencing, and how the stunning repercussions of imprisoning two million citizens affect all of America. In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing, Abramsky explores this new and dangerous fault-line in American society in a dramatic and compelling manner. From the opening courtroom scene through the final images behind the electrified fences of the nation's toughest, meanest prisons, Abramsky paints a grimly intimate portrait of the players and personalities behind this societal earthquake. Hard Time Blues combines a sense of history with a powerful narrative, to tell a story about issues and people that leads us to understand how The Land of the Free has become the world's largest prison nation.

In Menace to the Future, Jess Whatcott traces the link between US disability institutions and early twentieth-century eugenicist ideology, demonstrating how the legacy of those ideas continues to shape incarceration and detention today. Whatcott focuses on California, examining records from state institutions and reform organizations, newspapers, and state hospital museum exhibits. They reveal that state confinement, coercive treatment, care neglect, and forced sterilization were done out of the belief that the perceived unfitness of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people was hereditary and thus posed a biological threat—a so-called menace to the future. Whatcott uncovers a history of disabled resistance to these institutions that predates disability rights movements, builds a genealogy of resistance, and tells a history of eugenics from below. Theorizing how what they call “carceral eugenics” informed state treatment of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people a century ago, Whatcott shows not only how that same logic still exists in secure treatment facilities, state prisons, and immigration detention centers, but also why it must continue to be resisted.

Barbara Graham might have been a diabolical dame in a hard-boiled detective story--beautiful, sexy, and deadly. Charged alongside two male friends in the murder of an elderly widow during a botched robbery attempt, "Bloody Babs" became the third woman executed in California--after a 1953 trial that played out before standing-room-only crowds captured the imaginations of journalists, filmmakers, and death penalty opponents. Why, Kathleen A. Cairns asks, of all the capital cases in the twentieth century, did Graham's have such political resonance and staying power? Leaving aside the question of guilt or innocence--debated to this day--Cairns examines how Graham's case became a touchstone in the ongoing debate over capital punishment. While prosecutors positioned the accused woman as a femme fatale, the media came to offer a counternarrative for Graham's life highlighting her abusive and lonely beginnings. Cairns shows how Graham's case became crucial to the abolitionists of the time, who used instances of questionable guilt to raise awareness of the arbitrary and capricious nature of death penalty prosecutions. Critical in keeping capital punishment in the forefront of public consciousness until abolitionists homed in on a winning strategy, Graham's case illustrates the power of individual stories to shape wider perceptions and ultimately public policies.