Texas Tough

Eric Dexheimer reports in the Austin American Statesman on censorship run wild in TDCJ. My book only the latest.

Authors decry being locked out of lockup.

Where do you discuss a $70 billion government colossus that worsens racial inequality, arrests economic development, shatters families, and does little to enhance public safety? Failure Magazine.

Land of the Less-Free – Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire – Robert Perkinson interview – Failure magazine |.

In the next few weeks, President Obama is expected to sign breakthrough legislation minimizing the sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. The reforms are long overdue, but take only half a step toward racial justice. In this op-ed, I explain why racist crack laws are only part of the problem and why the President and his Democratic majority need to work hard on criminal justice while there’s still time.

From The Root: Nothing symbolizes the conflicted state of U.S. race relations more than the tortured odyssey of crack cocaine. Federal sentencing enhancements for the drug, which we now know is pharmacologically indistinguishable from powder cocaine, date to the Reagan administration. They have had an astonishingly injurious impact.

Although surveys show that most users of cocaine, in all its forms, are white, African Americans and Latinos account for 96 percent of crack convictions, most of them low-level street dealers. Because the mandatory penalties are so harsh–possession of 5 grams yields a minimum sentence of five years–African Americans with crack raps are now serving as much time in federal prison as whites convicted of violent offenses. Federal District Judge Robert Sweet calls it “Jim Crow justice.” …More

The Open Society Institute’s new blog features an interview with me on the southern origins of the U.S. prison boom, the singularity of Texas, the living legacy of slavery, and the unique features of criminal punishment in Hawaii.

Big Think interview on racism and criminal justice, the centrality of Texas, and prison rape.

A recent talk on the book at NYU. Streaming video on CSPAN.

In this new piece, I explain why the decision by Texas’s Board of Education to eliminate the concept “justice” from the state’s social studies standards might make sense after all. In the courts and in the penal system, there’s very little justice to be found.

t r u t h o u t | Texas Justice, American Injustice.

…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…

via Book Review – Texas Tough – The Rise of America’s Prison Empire – By Robert Perkinson – Review – NYTimes.com.

Today’s review in the Houston Chronicle: …With so many disturbing facts and figures, this is not an easy or pleasant book to read. But the author’s tales about such famous inmates as Huddie Ledbetter, David Ruiz and Caryl Chessman, along with other important characters in prison history, help move the story along and keep it interesting…

via Texas Tough | Bookish | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.

My take on Houston’s latest death penalty flap for the Huffington Post. District Judge Kevin Fine may have acted precipitously in ruling Texas’s capital punishment procedures unconstitutional last week, thereby opening himself to a torrent of criticism, but his reasoning is sound. In fact, Texas’s capital practices are so deeply flawed and prone to error, from indictment to clemency appeals, that the Lone Star State is almost surely carrying out, with surprising frequency, what Sandra Day O’Conner called constitutionally intolerable events: the execution of innocent persons. Robert Perkinson: Houston’s Death Penalty Hullabaloo.