Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire - Hardcover

Perkinson, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805080694 ISBN 13: 9780805080698

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2010

Synopsis

A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolution

In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became the national template.

Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, historian Robert Perkinson reveals the Southern roots of our present-day prison colossus. While conventional histories emphasize the North's rehabilitative approach, he shows how the retributive and profit-driven regime of the South ultimately triumphed. Most provocatively, he argues that just as convict leasing and segregation emerged in response to Reconstruction, so today's mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights.

Illuminating for the first time the origins of America's prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Perkinson is a professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, and Boston Review, among other venues. Texas Tough is his first book. He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805080694
• ISBN 13: 9780805080698
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 484