Reviews
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2010
An intensively researched, disturbing history of American penology focusing on the state with the largest prison system–Texas.
In his debut, Perkinson (American Studies, Univ. of Hawaii) asserts that criminologists traditionally study early New England reformatories, foreboding public institutions meant to restore wayward citizens to virtue that evolved into modem correctional bureaucracies still pursuing, however imperfectly, the ideal of reform. The author maintains that America always supported an alternative, purely punitive penology that originated in the slave-holding South and which, with the triumph of conservatives after the 1970s, is now the norm. Texas, rural and tolerant of violence between whites, arrested few people before 1865, but this changed with emancipation, when suppressing blacks became an obsessive priority. Unwilling to spend tax money, former Confederate states hired out prisoners to the highest bidder, where they worked as slaves. This was profitable, so when publicity about corruption and brutality forced states to discontinue “leasing out,” they substituted state-run plantations, mines and factories where conditions were hardly better. Class-action lawsuits during the civil-rights furor in the 1960s and ’70s produced draconian court decisions ordering reform. Some improvement occurred but many rulings were simply ignored, and by the ’80s Americans were so responsive to law-and-order appeals, and U.S. prison populations were mushrooming so rapidly, that there was no money to spare. Ironically, writes Perkinson, skyrocketing costs (Texas spends $3 billion per year) have produced the first conservative voices suggesting that matters are out of hand.
A convincing and discouraging argument that the Texas model of a profit-making, retributive prison system has become the national template.
Booklist, March 1, 2010
Although the American prison system is based (somewhat) on the principle of rehabilitation, it still retains, Perkinson says, powerful elements of one of its original influences: retribution. By way of explanation, he examines the country’s “harshest, largest penal system,” that of Texas, the state that “reigns supreme in the punishment business.” (In one city, Huntsville, almost half its population is in prison and another fifth works in jobs related to keeping them there.) Perkinson explores the history of the state and its penal system, showing how retribution, at least as much as rehabilitation, played a key role in the system’s evolution; and, by extension, he sheds light on the evolution ofpenal systems across the country. The American penal system, he argues, is very much a product of its southern influences (and, as a sure-to-be controversial corollary to that, the racial imbalance of its prisoners is a kind of backlash against the civil rights movement). A fascinating and often deeply troubling book.
-David Pitt
