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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Perkinson, Robert. "The Birth of the Texas Prison Empire, 1865-1915," Yale University, December 2001.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States manages one of the largest, most regimented prison systems ever assembled by a democratic government. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from legislative hearings to prison work songs, this dissertation argues that America’s punitive revolution can be explained through one tortured saga-the rise of the Texas prison empire. In the tumultuous decades after emancipation, Texas forged a hybrid penal system, cobbling together remnants of slavery with the emergent principles of scientific penology. Although the state initially hired out all convicts to the highest bidder, by the 1880s, state officials were combining private profit with government oversight and prisoner reformation with forced labor. Select convicts, usually Anglos, served time in industrial penitentiaries, while the majority, largely African American and Mexican, toiled on vast sugar and cotton plantations as slaves of the state. This two-tiered approach proved as controversial as it was profitable. Dismayed by sweat boxes, bloodhounds, and backbreaking toil, successive reformers struggled to refashion Texas’s “barbarian relics” into northern-style penitentiaries. Yet because reformers never challenged the social inequities that sustain prisons, nor the Manichean tensions that exist within them, their efforts repeatedly failed. Texas prisoners never entirely broke with their slaving roots. Instead, from 1915 forward, state leaders gradually perfected a severe, low-cost, racially diverse penalty that gained increasing legitimacy nationwide. Amidst a recrudescence of retributions in the late twentieth century, Texas justice became American justice.
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