Ben Austen

High-Risers braids personal narratives, city politics, and national history to tell the timely and epic story of Chicago's Cabrini-Green, America's most iconic public housing project....

Will Johnnie Veal—convicted of the murder of two police officers in 1970—be granted parole after 50 years in prison? How can he convince the parole board he’s reformed when he insists he’s innocent? What is prison time even supposed to accomplish?

In 1992, the deadliest year in Chicago’s history, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed in front of his elementary school inside the public housing complex Cabrini-Green.

The United States, alone, locks up a quarter of the world’s incarcerated people. And yet apart from clichés—paying a debt to society; you do the crime, you do the time—there is little sense collectively in America what constitutes retribution or atonement. We don’t actually know why we punish....