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.
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.
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4 min
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Sexual victimization in prison now has come to constitute a significant portion of that in society as a whole.
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7 min
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The massive rise in the prison population isn’t one of the primary reasons that crime has decreased.
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5 min
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We once hoped criminals would come out of prison better than they had entered. Not anymore.
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9 min
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Looking carefully at the history of Texas makes us rethink the history of crime and punishment and incarceration in the country as a whole.
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12 min
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Our skyrocketing incarceration rates are less related to crime than to racial politics, tough-on-crime rhetoric and for-profit prisons.
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5 min
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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.
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10 min
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A conversation with the author of “Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire.”
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46 min
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