Texas Tough

John Irwin, a most lucid critic of American criminal justice in both its rehabilitative and warehousing incarnations, had a pronounced influence on my own work. His writing on the internal cultural dynamics of California’s liberal penology of the 1950s and 1960s advanced the humanitarian skepticism of path-breakers like Donald Clemmer and Gresham Sykes and brilliantly combined sociology and autobiography. My heart goes out to Katy and her family who will miss him more than we will.

In the postwar period under Gov. Earl Warren, California built the most rehabilitation-oriented penal system in the country. Despite its many flaws, it represented a progressive counterweight to the hardline control model in Texas. Since the 1970s, however, all that has changed. In response to the rise of the right and reaction against the prison branch of the civil rights movement, California politicians launched and relaunched wars on crime with ever greater ferocity. Because of Prop. 13, there was no way to pay the bills, and because of the state’s highly effective guard union, the bills are whoppers, $10 billion a year. Combine that with a severe economic downturn, and Cali has a first-class human-made disaster on its hands: California Budget Held Captive By State Prisons : NPR.