On Monday, Marie Gottschalk reviewed Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire by Robert Perkins in the New Republic. http://www.tnr.com/book/review/american-hell

This important new book is definitely worth reading if you care about issues related to mass incarceration.  Gottschalk’s most salient point in the review is:

“Perkinson upends the conventional narrative of the rise of the American penal system with its emphasis on the northeast, notably New York and Pennsylvania. In the standard account, the foreboding penitentiaries of the nineteenth century, designed to restore errant citizens to virtue through penitent solitude, evolved by fits and starts into the correctional bureaucracies of the twentieth century, which, at least for a time, viewed rehabilitating prisoners as a central part of their mission. Perkinson suggests that the history of punishment in the United States is more a southern story than has been generally recognized. He contends that Texas developed an alternative “control model” of punishment that was unapologetically premised on officially sanctioned violence, strident exploitation of penal labor, a strong retributive urge, and stark racial stratification.”

Perkins’s book really does revise my own personal understanding about this history of the rise of prisons in the United States.  This was the biggest take-away for me from the book.  Texas Tough is well-researched and at times gruesome as Perkins describes truly horrific practices that have and continue to take place in Texas “correctional” institutions.