Book
Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire is a history of imprisonment, race, and politics from slavery to the present, with an emphasis on Texas, the most locked-down state in the nation. Sweeping in scope and exhaustively researched, it tries to answer some of the most vexing questions of our time: Why has the United States built the largest prison system in the world, unlike anything in the history of democratic governance, and why have racial disparities in criminal justice worsened over the past two generations, despite the landmark victories of the civil rights movement? Drawing on a decade of archival, legal, and legislative research, combined with scores of interviews, this book argues that the history of American criminal justice is a more southern story than most have acknowledged (the prison boom began and has remained most pervasive in the South) and that the politics of race and reaction have played a more prominent role in the expansion of incarceration than elevated crime rates. By drawing parallels between the development of segregation and convict leasing in the aftermath of Reconstruction and the rise of mass imprisonment in the wake of integration, Texas Tough contends that America’s imprisonment crisis has taken shape as the latest chapter in America’s tragic racial history and that a concerted nationwide effort will be required to move the country toward a more equitable and genuinely democratic future. More...
Sample Chapter
Chap. 1: Prison Heartland (PDF)Blurbs
Texas Tough is a raw, compelling assessment of racial disparity and southern culture as they have determined the massive over-incarceration of African Americans. If you want to understand how politics, not crime control, governs today’s prison population, read this book. Anyone concerned with justice and fairness should place this on their must-read list. —Charles J. Ogletree Jr., Harvard Law School, and author of When Law Fails and All Deliberate Speed.Texas Tough shows that the politics of race has always governed the politics of punishment and explains why our criminal justice system is the frontline of America’s human rights struggle in the twenty-first century. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to build a stronger America and put these decades of over-incarceration (and under-education) of Americans behind us. —Benjamin Todd Jealous, President, NAACP
“This book is a Texas Death Match between David (Robert Perkinson) and Goliath (the American prison system). Goliath is armed, violent, massive, and hard to bring down, but David has a sling and a book full of smooth stones taken from the brook of history.” —Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human History
"Robert Perkinson's exhaustive study of the Texas prison system reveals in ruthless detail how the historical violence of slavery continues to define imprisonment in the twenty-first century. The focus here is on Texas prisons not only because they constitute the flagship system of the South but also because the coexistence of practices of racialized violence with theories of rehabilitation has established the core contradiction of U.S. punishment regimes today. Undoubtedly, Texas Tough is destined to become a classic." Angela Y. Davis, Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz More...
