JULY 30TH, 2010. A warm, clear night with a deflated beach ball of a moon, and three men were slipping through the perimeter fence of Kingman prison in Golden Valley, Arizona. Behind them, the prison rang with the muffled shouts and clanging of thousands of caged men. Ahead, a pale strip of paved road and beyond that the shrub-spotted desert, silent and sentineled by tall cacti and coyotes. All of it, the desert, the prison, the three creeping men, encircled by mountain ranges that appeared as bluish smudges in the distance, like scrubbed chalk against the sky.