Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire - Rilegato

Perkinson, Robert

 
9780805080698: Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire

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A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's 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 North's 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 today's mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights.

Illuminating for the first time the origins of America's prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Robert Perkinson is a professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, and Boston Review, among other venues. Texas Tough is his first book. He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii.

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Altre edizioni note dello stesso titolo

9780312680473: Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire

Edizione in evidenza

ISBN 10:  0312680473 ISBN 13:  9780312680473
Casa editrice: Picador USA, 2010
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