ISS - Texas Tough: An Interview with Robert Perkinson
Texas Tough: An Interview with Robert Perkinson
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 always bad, sometimes worse" -- but there is even less in Texas.
In the South, the ethic of rehabilitation never really took hold. Prisons were built not to educate or cure but to impose vengeance and extract labor. So even though good intentions have gone awry in Northern prisons, bad intentions have gone to even worse places in the South.
Comments