Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards and lawmakers, the author reveals the Southern roots of America's present-day prison colossus, in a sweeping history from the days of slavery to the present. 35,000 first printing.
Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, the author reveals the Southern roots of America's present-day prison colossus, in a sweeping history from the days of slavery to the present.
In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. This sweeping history of American imprisonment shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric becomes the national template--and how that injustice can change.
A vivid history of Americas biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nations punitive revolution
In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became the national template.
Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, historian Robert Perkinson reveals the Southern roots of our present-day prison colossus. While conventional histories emphasize the Norths rehabilitative approach, he shows how the retributive and profit-driven regime of the South ultimately triumphed. Most provocatively, he argues that just as convict leasing and segregation emerged in response to Reconstruction, so todays mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights.
Illuminating for the first time the origins of Americas prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.
