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Robert Perkinson
Author, “Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire”
Robert Perkinson is the author of "Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire," a history of American punishment that focuses on the country’s most incarcerated and politically influential state, Texas. His research focuses on how the dynamics of race, politics, crime, and for-profit prisons have intersected to create a uniquely harsh system that seeks to punish rather than rehabilitate prisoners. He is a Soros Justice Fellow and a professor at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
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4mins
The U.S. is now incarcerating on a level so out of sync with it’s own history—and with what other industrial democracies are doing—that the system is bound to change.
6mins
Sexual victimization in prison now has come to constitute a significant portion of that in society as a whole.
4mins
The massive rise in the prison population isn’t one of the primary reasons that crime has decreased.
9mins
We once hoped criminals would come out of prison better than they had entered. Not anymore.
11mins
Looking carefully at the history of Texas makes us rethink the history of crime and punishment and incarceration in the country as a whole.
4mins
Our skyrocketing incarceration rates are less related to crime than to racial politics, tough-on-crime rhetoric and for-profit prisons.
10mins
African-Americans are imprisoned at seven times the rate of whites. Intentional discrimination is a factor in this—as are poverty, educational attainment, urban density, and white flight from urban centers.