From Dollars To Senses Down In New Orleans

The journey of Cuttie started early back in New Orleans, when he witnessed countless murders, drug deals, lots of money laundering, and corrupt police and politicians. Cuttie never expected the things that life threw at him while he was trying to get revenge on the kingpin of New Orleans but found bullets flying toward his life. After the revenge was best served cold, Cuttie started to become the person he didn't want to become. He found himself caught up in the corrupt lifestyle of drugs, extortion, sex, money, and nonstop violence. He knew what was going to happen to him, and he knew he needed change, but life threw the last curveball his way.

The journey of Cuttie started early back in New Orleans, when he witnessed countless murders, drug deals, lots of money laundering, and corrupt police and politicians. Cuttie never expected the things that life threw at him while he was trying to get revenge on the kingpin of New Orleans but found bullets flying toward his life. After the revenge was best served cold, Cuttie started to become the person he didn't want to become. He found himself caught up in the corrupt lifestyle of drugs, extortion, sex, money, and nonstop violence. He knew what was going to happen to him, and he knew he needed change, but life threw the last curveball his way.

Sothern, a death penalty lawyer who with his wife, photographer Nikki Page, arrived in New Orleans four years ahead of Katrina, delivers a haunting, personal, and quintessentially American story.

Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020. Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

From 1910 to 1919, New Orleans suffered at the hands of its very own Jack the Ripper–style killer. The story has been the subject of websites, short stories, novels, a graphic novel, and most recently the FX television series American Horror Story. But the full story of gruesome murders, sympathetic victims, accused innocents, public panic, the New Orleans Mafia, and a mysterious killer has never been written. Until now. The Axeman repeatedly broke into the homes of Italian grocers in the dead of night, leaving his victims in a pool of blood. Iorlando Jordano, an innocent Italian grocer, and his teenaged son Frank were wrongly accused of one of those murders; corrupt officials convicted them with coerced testimony. Miriam C. Davis here expertly tells the story of the search for the Axeman and of the eventual exoneration of the innocent Jordanos. She proves that the person mostly widely suspected of being the Axeman was not the killer. She also shows what few have suspected—that the Axeman continued killing after leaving New Orleans in 1919. Only thirty years after Jack the Ripper stalked the streets of Whitechapel, the Axeman of New Orleans held an American city hostage. This book tells that story.