{"id":516353,"date":"2010-04-05T09:40:46","date_gmt":"2010-04-05T13:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.southernstudies.org,2010:\/\/5.12211"},"modified":"2010-04-05T10:08:35","modified_gmt":"2010-04-05T14:08:35","slug":"texas-tough-an-interview-with-robert-perkinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/516353","title":{"rendered":"Texas Tough: An Interview with Robert Perkinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"texas_tough.jpg\"<\/a><\/span>By Adam Culbreath, Open Society Blog<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Your new book, Texas Tough: The Rise of a
\nPrison Empire<\/a><\/em>, paints a pretty dismal and disturbing picture
\nof the history of incarceration in the state.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There’s not much happiness in the history of imprisonment — an inmate
\nwho had done forty-three years once wrote to me, “prison is always bad,
\n sometimes worse” — but there is even less in Texas.<\/p>\n

In the South, the ethic of rehabilitation never really took hold.
\nPrisons were built not to educate or cure but to impose vengeance and
\nextract labor. So even though good intentions have gone awry in
\nNorthern prisons, bad intentions have gone to even worse places in the
\nSouth.<\/p>\n

Most distressing is that Texas prisons have not overcome their
\nhistory. The record is full of atrocities and miscarriages of justice:
\nemancipated slaves convicted of petty offenses and sold off to the
\nhighest bidder; unpaid convict laborers worked to death in coal mines
\nand sugar plantations; community lynchings and assembly-line executions;
\n countless sexual exploitation scandals. Some of the most egregious
\nabuses have faded with the passage of time, thanks to successive reform
\n movements, but by many measures Texas is dispensing harsher justice
\ntoday than it ever was. Twenty-first century inmates are less likely to
\n get beaten up by guards or worked to exhaustion, but they’re more
\nlikely to spend their natural lives in prison, often in supermax
\nstorage facilities that wall them off from all human contact. In the
\nprison business, chronology doesn’t necessarily beget progress.<\/p>\n

In the American popular imagination, Texas is a place of
\nmyth.  Even people outside the state, who may never have set foot on
\nTexas soil, have well-formed and detailed notions — however inaccurate — of
\n what the state is, or at least what it represents.  What role has the
\nmythology of Texas played in the evolution of its penal system?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Texas is a Southern state masquerading as a Western state. Its myth
\nstems from the violence of the frontier, and to a certain extent, the
\nlegacy of conquest has shaped the culture of law enforcement,
\nparticularly in the case of the revered (or feared) Texas Rangers. But
\nthe state’s prisons have grown out of alternate historical seedbeds
\nthat many Texans would just as soon forget: slavery and white supremacy.<\/p>\n

Until the 1980s, all of the state’s penal facilities were located in
\n East Texas, the former slavery belt. Even now, gangs of unpaid convict
\n laborers — disproportionally made up of African Americans — trudge out to
\nthe fields under the command of mounted overseers called “bosses.”
\nCotton and cane plantations like Ramsey, Wynne, and Eastham have
\noperated continuously since the 1820s, but have never pulled in a crop
\nwith free labor. To a remarkable extent, Texas prisons have preserved
\nthe lifeways of slavery in carceral amber.<\/p>\n

Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Texas’s
\nimplacable style of punishment predicated on hard labor, corporal
\npunishment, and racial debasement made the state a backwater in the
\neyes of progressive penologists. But as the country’s conservative
\ncounterrevolution gained strength in the post-civil rights period,
\nTexas’s singular severity garnered outspoken admirers; the state’s
\nprison system became not a blot on civilization but a model to emulate.<\/p>\n

The punitive ethos that I’m calling “Texas tough” gets cast as
\nno-nonsense justice passed down from hardscrabble pioneers, but in
\nreality it represents the resurgence of Southern conservatism in
\nAmerican politics, the final revenge of the Confederacy on the Union.<\/p>\n

Why is the American South so punitive?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s an under-appreciated fact that America’s exceptional prison
\nboom ignited and reached greatest explosive force in the South. The
\nregion accounts for roughly a third of the U.S. population but houses
\nalmost half of state prisoners; Southern states are responsible for 83
\npercent of all executions in the United States since 1976.<\/p>\n

There are a variety of factors implicated in Southern punitiveness:
\nviolent crime rates are higher, in both rural and urban areas; social
\nwelfare spending, which can help prevent crime, is more anemic;
\neducational attainment lags; partisan politics remains rigidly
\npolarized by race. All of this stems, I argue, from the history of
\nslavery — the engine of economic growth and social formation in the South
\nfor more than a century before the Civil War — and Jim Crow, which
\ngoverned the region for a century thereafter. Slavery and segregation
\nfostered a political culture based on localism, anti-governmentalism,
\ninterpersonal retaliation, and suspicion of all things progressive,
\nfrom science to rehabilitative penology. That political inheritance
\ncontinues to have resonance, two generations after the victories of the
\n civil rights movement; we see echoes of Dixiecratic demagoguery in the
\nTea Party movement, for instance. As Alexis de Tocqueville once
\nremarked, “Although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can
\nobliterate the traces of its existence.”<\/p>\n

In Texas, the pronounced strain of racial violence that runs through
\n the state’s history — not just against African Americans but Indians and
\n Native Americans — adds punitive punch. Rather recently, by historical
\nstandards, the state played host to vicious and protracted warfare
\nagainst the Comanche and other indigenous peoples; massacres and ethnic
\n cleansing of Mexicans continued into the twentieth century. This
\nvolatile and divisive history gives the state’s political culture, and
\nits criminal justice institutions, a razored edge.<\/p>\n

Your book posits that race should be a more explicit and
\ncentral part of the contemporary discussion around crime and
\nincarceration.  How does a heightened awareness of race change the
\ndynamics — and potential outcomes — of the conversation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everyone recognizes that race is an important variable in criminal
\njustice. The statistics are too stark to ignore. Black men in America
\nare more likely to go to prison than earn a bachelor’s degree or serve
\nin the armed forces. <\/sup>A recent study found that 1 in 4
\nAfrican American children have a father in prison. <\/sup>Curiously,
\n though, relatively few social scientists have made race a central
\ncategory of analysis; it’s treated as an externality, not an engine.<\/p>\n

Because it’s difficult for us to think clearly about our own moment
\nin time (we’re overwhelmed by complexity and can’t always discern
\nmeaningful patterns), I decided to step back and examine the role of
\nrace and racism in criminal justice over the longue dur\u00e9e<\/em>,
\nfrom the first epoch of American unfreedom, slavery, to our own, mass
\nincarceration.<\/p>\n

I found that race has always been a driving force in public policy
\ndebates, usually a malign one, from the birth of the republic forward.
\nIn particular, I argue that the watershed developments surrounding the
\nCivil War can help us understand the punitive turn since the 1960s. In
\nthe nineteenth century, white conservatives lost on slavery, but by
\nmeans both legal and nefarious were able to forge a new, similarly
\nstratified social order based on de jure discrimination, command labor
\nrelations, and convict leasing. In the twentieth century, white
\nconservatives lost on integration but retreated to criminal justice,
\nsubstituting, in effect, segregated drinking fountains for merciless
\nsentencing statutes. Chased out of the free world, Jim Crow moved behind
\n bars.<\/p>\n

Is Texas a bellwether?  If so, what trends are — or should
\nbe — ripe for export?<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

In the postwar period, California stood for the future, but Texas is
\n the paradigmatic state of conservative counterrevolution. In criminal
\njustice, the Lone Star State has led the way in prison privatization,
\nmandatory sentencing, supermax confinement, and, of course, lethal
\ninjections. The result is a $3 billion behemoth, the Texas Department of
\n Criminal Justice, that governs the lives of 705,000 prisoners,
\nparolees, and probationers — equivalent to the population of Austin.<\/p>\n

Very little of this merits export. On the other hand, some Texas
\nlawmakers are starting to sober up from their prison binge. Over the
\ninitial objections of Governor Rick Perry, the legislature passed
\nsignificant probation reforms in 2007 that are already starting to
\ntemper the pace of prison growth. <\/sup>Downsizing is what we need,
\n but this is a step in the right direction.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Texas Tough<\/em> is a work of history.  But it also, I
\nimagine, makes a case for why the past matters for the present and the
\nfuture.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Looking at crime and punishment in a wide historical frame reveals
\njust how exceptional this moment is. For most of the twentieth century
\n(for as long as we have accurate records), the United States
\nincarcerated about 1 out of every 100,000 people, but the rate has
\nquintupled since the 1970s. Now the United States locks up about 1 of
\nevery 100 adults, for a total of 2.4 million. <\/sup>No other
\ndemocracy has ever done anything like this.<\/p>\n

One of the points I want to make clear in the book is that the rise
\nof the U.S. prison state constitutes a momentous pivot in American
\nhistory, comparable in scale (though with inverted effects) to the
\nProgressive Era or the New Deal. To me, this means that a powerful,
\nwide-ranging social movement will be necessary to change course.
\nCriminal justice should be the civil rights arena of the twenty-first
\ncentury.<\/p>\n

As a student in the 1980s and 1990s, you led student
\ndelegations to El Salvador, Cuba, and Angola; established a free
\nHIV-testing program at the University of Colorado; organized for
\ngraduate student unionization at Yale; and co-founded a criminal
\njustice reform coalition in Connecticut.  How has your student activism
\n informed your work as a historian?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Enormously. In the book I examine a series of grassroots movements
\nthat tried, generally without success, to dislodge Texas’s penal system
\n from its slaving foundation: opponents of convict leasing in the late
\nnineteenth century, feminist humanitarians in the 1920s who proposed
\nreplacing the state’s prison plantations with a centralized criminal
\ntreatment facility, and prisoners’ rights radicals who challenged their
\nkeepers in federal court. Had I not been involved in so much community
\norganizing myself, I think I would have had greater difficulty
\nunderstanding my research subjects, their tactical choices, and the
\nformidable challenges they faced.<\/p>\n

You’re now a professor at the University of Hawaii.  Do your
\n students seem worried that this country incarcerates so many people
\nfor such long periods of time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not as much as I’d like, but I’m working on it.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Hawaii — another place heavily mythologized in
\nthe American imagination — what has your work on Texas Tough taught you
\nabout crime, punishment and incarceration in your home state?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hawai’i is in one sense the anti-Texas. It’s a liberal, pro-union,
\nmulticultural state with discretionary sentencing and a tiny (by U.S.
\nstandards) prison population. But there’s an underside, and, as in
\nTexas, it’s hard to appreciate without taking a historical view.<\/p>\n

In Hawai’i, criminal justice policies have grown out of colonial
\nrather than slaveholding roots. Native Hawaiians were divested of their
\n lands, their government was illegally overthrown, and their islands
\nforcibly annexed by the United States. Today, more than a century
\nlater, indigenous Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders cluster around
\nthe bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy, not unlike Native Americans
\non the continent. They also go to prison in hugely disproportionate
\nnumbers (though Hawaiians make up only about 20 percent of the state’s
\npopulation, they fill roughly 40 percent of its prison beds). To save
\nmoney, Hawai’i has also, in effect, resurrected the old British
\nTransportation system: Rather than housing prisoners at home,
\ncorrections authorities ship them off to for-profit, low-wage
\nfacilities in Kentucky and Arizona. The effect, in a sense, is to
\ndepopulate the islands of its troublesome indigenous inhabitants and to
\n shatter their family ties.<\/p>\n

Overall, I would say that Texas’s experience has taught me to think
\nabout Hawai’i’s criminal justice system in historical context. More
\npractically, I also try to use Texas’s example to warn lawmakers off
\ntough-on-crime political grandstanding. The Texas way might fend off
\nattack ads but it leads inexorably to bloated big government, heavy
\ncollateral damage, and scant benefits in terms of public safety. My hope
\n is that the recession will encourage politicians to get smart on crime
\n rather than tough on crime.<\/p>\n

Soros Justice Fellow Robert Perkinson is a professor at the
\nUniversity of Hawai’i at Manoa. <\/em>Adam
\nCulbreath is a program officer for the Soros<\/p>\n

Justice Fellowships<\/a>.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Adam Culbreath, Open Society Blog Your new book, Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire, paints a pretty dismal and disturbing picture of the history of incarceration in the state. There’s not much happiness in the history of imprisonment — an inmate who had done forty-three years once wrote to me, “prison is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-516353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/247"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}