In a penal system that legalises slavery, who is the real criminal? That question lies at the heart of Danny Lyon's landmark 1971 monograph, Conversations with the Dead, a masterwork of New Journalism chronicling crime and punishment in the United States. After his work in the Civil Rights Movement and with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club , Lyon gained unprecedented access to seven penitentiaries inside the Texas Department of Corrections over 14 months in 1967-68 to create a Dostoevskyian journey into the belly of the beast.