Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire is a 2010 book by Robert Perkinson, published by Metropolitan Books.
Perkinson, an American Studies professor at University of Hawaii at Manoa,[1] describes the criminal justice system in Texas and how it formed in the context of the post-United States Civil War environment.[2] Perkinson states that, unlike the prisons described in his book, the early prison systems studied by many criminologists are those in New England.[3] Perkinson describes the historical system as being punishment-only and primarily motivated to suppress black people when it was no longer possible to legally enslave them without their having committed a crime.[3] Therefore, Perkinson perceived this system as a continuation of slavery.[4] The book covers the terms of O.B. Ellis and George Beto as the heads of the Texas prison system, as well as the Ruiz v. Estelle lawsuit.[5] The author argues that in the post-Civil Rights Movement era in the 20th Century the rest of the country ultimately adopted the punitive Southern attitude towards incarceration.[6]
The book criticizes the expansion of incarceration and the pro-incarceration political movements.[5]