A convincing and discouraging argument that the Texas model of a profit-making, retributive prison system has become the...
An intensively researched, disturbing history of American penology focusing on the state with the largest prison system—Texas.
In his debut, Perkinson (American Studies/Univ. of Hawaii) asserts that criminologists traditionally study early New England reformatories, foreboding public institutions meant to restore wayward citizens to virtue that evolved into modern correctional bureaucracies still pursuing, however imperfectly, the ideal of reform. The author maintains that America always supported an alternative, purely punitive penology that originated in the slave-holding South and which, with the triumph of conservatives after the 1970s, is now the norm. Texas, rural and tolerant of violence between whites, arrested few people before 1865, but this changed with emancipation, when suppressing blacks became an obsessive priority. Unwilling to spend tax money, former Confederate states hired out prisoners to the highest bidder, where they worked as slaves. This was profitable, so when publicity about corruption and brutality forced states to discontinue “leasing out,” they substituted state-run plantations, mines and factories where conditions were hardly better. Class-action lawsuits during the civil-rights furor in the 1960s and ’70s produced draconian court decisions ordering reform. Some improvement occurred but many rulings were simply ignored, and by the ’80s Americans were so responsive to law-and-order appeals, and U.S. prison populations were mushrooming so rapidly, that there was no money to spare. Ironically, writes Perkinson, skyrocketing costs—Texas spends $3 billion per year—have produced the first conservative voices suggesting that matters are out of hand.
A convincing and discouraging argument that the Texas model of a profit-making, retributive prison system has become the national template.Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8069-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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