Texas Tough - book review

Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. By Robert Perkinson. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. Pp. 496. Illustrations, notes, index. ISBN 9780805080698, $35.00 cloth.)


“Every human being is a potential criminal and every criminal is a potentially honest man” (161). This quote, attributed to a progressive-leaning administrator on Texas’s Board of Prison Commissioners, lies in the minority when it comes to Texas prison mottos. With its renegade persona, the Texas penal system has historically set a tough standard for American prisons. Using Texas as the backdrop, Robert Perkinson’s Texas Tough analyzes the life and times of America’s harshest and largest penal system. Perkinson claims to propose fresh ways of thinking about imprisonment and society while piecing together a more complete genealogy of the modern prison. The author is a professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and Texas Tough is his first published book. 

The author’s chief argument centers on how the prison system developed as a lingering effect of slavery. Perkinson documents nineteenth century prison arrangements that originated as convict leasing. Drawing parallels between slavery and convict leasing, he points to the horrific working conditions, the use of force and punishment that usually took the form of the whip, and the meager food allowances as indicators of how slavery and prisoners were treated similarly. Then the author skillfully describes how today’s Imperial Sugar Company was founded with slave capital and built by the convict leasing system. 

In the twentieth century Texas began moving away from convict leasing to the more profitable plantation prison system. Perkinson explains how the plantation prison system was built and thrived, again as an aftereffect of slavery. Politicians intended prisons to be self-sufficient and turn a profit without regard to convict welfare. Contemporary sources used in Texas Tough, usually in the form of jailhouse memoirs or letters, all indicate that crop yield was the most important factor evaluated by prison farm managers. 

By the 1970s Texas prisons were in no better shape than in the days of convict leasing and plantation labor. A revolution was on the way in the form of a writ writer named David Ruiz and his landmark legal case, Ruiz v. Estelle. Citing jailhouse interviews and exchanges of letters and artwork, Perkinson and Ruiz corresponded in heavy discourse on the injustices Texas inmates were suffering at the hands of the Texas prison system, building tenders, guards, and other inmates. With little other support needed, the author points to this one legal case as changing the face of not only Texas’s penal system, but of those across the United States as well. While Ruiz v. Estelle was the first and most prominent prisoner-initiated legal case over inhumane treatment of inmates, there were many other writ writers and several who influenced Ruiz while he served his prison sentences. In addition, several northern states had made sporadic attempts at prison reform for many years. Therefore, reformation of the American prison system cannot be completely attributed to Ruiz v. Estelle. 

Finally, Perkinson concludes Texas Tough with a comparison of George W. Bush’s tactics on interrogation methods of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay with the Texan theory of punishment. The author postulates that Bush’s hard-line stance, including water-boarding and sleep and food deprivation, on suspected terrorists resulted from being brought up in Texas and exposed to the Texas justice and prison system as a citizen and then as governor. This is a broad claim, especially considering the level and type of crimes of international terrorists compared to the common Texas offender. Perkinson describes the common Texas offender as a black male in his early twenties with no job. This description gives an entirely different profile to that of an international terrorist. 

Despite his sometimes overlong critical assessment of the Texas prison system, Perkinson allows three reformative approaches to the current penal system: stay the retributive course, attempt better criminal rehabilitation, and the author’s own declaration of a War on Poverty. Texas Tough provides overwhelming evidence that the retributive incarceration method is costly and generally does not reform offenders. Criminal rehabilitation has been experimented with, namely in California, but leaves marginal hope of rehabilitating the majority of inmates. Lastly, Perkinson’s War on Poverty alternative provides the one solution to the American prison problem that involves preventative measures instead of imprisonment or retribution. 

Texas Tough goes beyond mere parochialism to explore America’s history of the penal system. No history of that system would be complete without Texas serving as the guiding light. Texas Tough is accessible to readers across the board, especially for those seeking to understand Texas’s infatuation with incarceration.


Jaycie Smith