The mass incarceration system has been dubbed “the new Jim Crow”—there are now more Black men in prison or on probation or parole than there were living in bondage as chattel slaves in 1850. There are significantly more people caught up in the system of incarceration and supervision in America today—over six million—than inhabited Stalin’s gulag at its height. And while the United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s people, it holds over 25 percent of the world’s combined prison population. There’s more, of course, but you get the idea—the tentacles of the criminal legal system touch us all, coming down with especially lethal force against poor and marginalized people who are increasingly deemed disposable in the eyes of the powerful. We’re joined in conversation with Patrick Hoffman, a writer and private investigator based in Brooklyn whose latest novel, Friends Helping Friends, is a dazzling triller and a portrait of two young men living on the borderland of society. Their unwanted contact with a corrupt legal system drags them into a frightening brush with a white nationalist group that tests the redemptive power of friendship.