Texas Monthly Reporter
Winners and losers from the Republican convention; a crash course for butlers; biting the bullet in Orange County; the peculiar appeal of the Texas State Guard; a bookie tells his trade secrets.
Winners and losers from the Republican convention; a crash course for butlers; biting the bullet in Orange County; the peculiar appeal of the Texas State Guard; a bookie tells his trade secrets.
By Jim Atkinson
Why are we crazy for Cadillacs, silly on Suburbans, passionate about pickups? Because Texans love their cars, that's why.
By Jim Atkinson
Where to find a life-size statue of businessmen shaking hands, the best right-wing burgers, and other landmarks of Republican life.
By Jim Atkinson and Peter Applebome
How Texas became a two-party state in spite of the GOP.
By Jim Atkinson and Paul Burka
What do drunks, prostitutes, lunatics, and elevators have in common? They’re all part of the weird 24-hour-a-day world of the Dallas County courthouse.
By Jim Atkinson
Candy Montgomery thought her affair with Allan Gore was over, until she found herself fighting for her life against Allan’s wife.
By Jim Atkinson and John Bloom
Urban refugees fleeing high-tech Dallas have created ersatz rural communities in the nearby countryside. This isolated, pastoral life sometimes erupts into adultery and murder.
By Jim Atkinson and John Bloom
A new era for Texas prisons; a new view of Wichita Falls; a new look, alas, for a Dallas street; a new metropolis in East Texas; a new generation of frat rats.
By Jim Atkinson
To become more than a perpetual boom town, Dallas needs a foresighted leader and astute politician. Is Starke Taylor the man?
By Jim Atkinson
Sometimes women fall in love with men behind bars, but once the bars disappear, the love itself may become the prison.
By Jim Atkinson
No Matter where you are, there’s someplace to be nowhere.
By Jim Atkinson
It’s a noble institution, especially if you can master all its subtle skills: not being there, the second call, holding forth, and another thing...
By Jim Atkinson
Sometimes prison is harder for the people on the other side of the bars.
By Jim Atkinson
Soon there won’t be anyone left who wants to be a cop.
By Jim Atkinson
Probation gives criminals a chance to show society that they can stay straight. Probation officers like Jan Purdom believe the system works.
By Jim Atkinson
Used correctly, the polygraph can tell whether or not an accused criminal’s claim that he didn’t do it is true. Too bad the police can’t take that to court.
By Jim Atkinson
Rusty Hardin is a prosecutor. Most of the time, his job is to put people in jail. This time, he wants a man dead.
By Jim Atkinson
To unjam its prisons, Texas is moving convicted felons out of the big house and into a house on your block.
By Jim Atkinson
Trial by jury is a right most people charged with a crime never get to exercise. Instead, they accept a quicker, less risky alternative: the plea bargain.
By Jim Atkinson
Every year thousands of men and women assault, molest, or murder innocent victims - their own children.
By Jim Atkinson
John Catchings can sole crimes without witnesses, confessions, or clues. How? He’s a psychic.
By Jim Atkinson
Mandatory sentencing means every felon gets the same sentence for the same crime - and for the rest of us it means a lot of crimes that won’t happen.
By Jim Atkinson
A tale of passion in the double-knit aristocracy.
By Jim Atkinson
Is your family safer with a gun in the house?
By Jim Atkinson
Violence within the family tends not to be taken too seriously by the courts. But eventually that violence will burst loose to threaten us all.
By Jim Atkinson
Lock your doors. The police have given up trying to catch burglars.
By Jim Atkinson
The secret life of the man who tells the Man.
By Jim Atkinson
Question: What goes on behind the closed doors of the stateÌs most elegant restaurant these days? Answer: Nothing.
By Jim Atkinson
Those who haunt the singles bars aren’t always what they seem—namely, single.
By Jim Atkinson