Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire is a history of American punishment with an emphasis on the Lone Star State, which manages the biggest, baddest prison system in the nation. It begins on the bottomland cotton and cane plantations of East Texas, which incubated the state’s criminal-justice traditions of hard labor, corporal discipline, racial subjugation, and rock-bottom budgets. It culminates, more than a century and a half later, with the governorship of George W. Bush, the most punishing chief executive in state history. Based on more than a decade of research, the book explains how Texas’s penal system went from backwater to behemoth, chronicling the collateral damage along the way. It argues that the U.S. prison boom took shape in response to the civil rights movement, just as Jim Crow, lynching, and convict leasing grew up in the aftermath of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Texas Tough is forthcoming from Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt in 2008.
