Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire
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A vivid history of America’s biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation’s punitive revolutionIn 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. The New York Times - Daniel Bergner …Perkinson offers a searching history of American incarceration, tracing the failures of our prisons to the approach that Texas and other Southern states have long taken toward their criminals and denouncing the fact that, with about 1.6 million people in our penitentiaries and an additional 800,000 in our jails, the United States locks up its citizens at a higher rate than any other country in the world…This is an alarming indictment, built on passionate and exhaustive research.
Introduction 11 Prison Heartland 152 Plantation and Penitentiary 473 "Worse Than Slavery" 834 The Agonies of Reform 1325 The Penal Colony That Wasn't 1776 "Best in the Nation" 2157 Appeal to Justice 2518 Retributive Revolution 2869 The Triumph of Texas Tough 325Conclusion 357Notes 375Acknowledgments 467Index 471
