Fox Butterfield is the author of
In My Father's House: A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family. From the transcript of his NPR interview with Ailsa Chang:
CHANG: So at the beginning of this book, you state a stunning statistic - I couldn't believe it when I read it - that as little as 5 percent of families are behind half of all the crime in the U.S. When did you start thinking about crime as a family affair? I know you covered criminal justice for quite some time.
BUTTERFIELD: I covered criminal justice for The New York Times for almost 15 years, and I had written a previous book about a black family with multiple generations of criminals. And I wanted to find a white family which could illustrate this because some of the studies were done so long ago that most of the - all the people in some of the studies - from the one in Boston, for example - were all white. And I wanted to see if I could take race out of the equation to disentangle race from crime.
CHANG: So let's talk about the family you focused on in this book. They're the Bogles. They're white, as you already mentioned. They're poor. You trace this family all the way back to right after the Civil War, and you discover 60 members of this family ended up in prison or jail or some juvenile reformatory, which is just staggering in and of itself.
BUTTERFIELD: Yes, it sounds like something out of ...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue
Fox Butterfield is the author of In My Father's House: A New View of How Crime Runs in the Family. From the transcript of his NPR interview with Ailsa Chang: