In American Dream, his masterful new book about welfare reform, Jason DeParle brings together two groups of people who rarely seem to meet: welfare policy-makers and welfare recipients.

Our nation's two-decade spree of building prisons and sentencing even nonviolent criminals to long spells inside them has produced a staggering number of incarcerated people in America--more than

With each last reverberation from the world of 1960s and '70s radicalism--the recent parole of Kathy Boudin, for example, a member of the Weather Underground who served twenty-two years in pris