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Tough talk on Texas prison system

Monday afternoon I attended a packed lecture at the UT Law School by Robert Perkinson, author of the book Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire. UT has put three blog posts online by Michele Deitch, Jorge Renaud, and Mary Crouter reacting to the book. (I've got a copy but I'm afraid it keeps getting pushed down my "to-read" list.)Perkinson said he focused on Texas (he actually teaches in Hawaii, lucky guy) because the historiography of prisons is biased toward the Northeast and to a lesser extent toward California. Criminal justice policy innovations, he said, don't just flow from north to south but increasingly in the other direction. He believes Texas was the first to forge a hybrid approach to prisons, merging techniques from the north with a plantation-approach dating to Reconstruction...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on November 24, 2010 (boomark / email).