citizens and details the north's interest in rehabilitation and the south's belief in retribution and profit. mr. perkinson claims the southern ideology became the template for today's american prison system. new york university in new york city hosts this hour and 20 minute event. thank you for having me. and a sign of how much the far right has regained its confidence in its thrashing in 2008, last month the texas state board of education voted to radically overhaul their social studies curriculum that influences textbook purchases nationwide. out with thomas jefferson who called into question the pie the other founders, in came jefferson davis who fought for states rights. last nose was elimination of justice from the list of virtues texas schoolchildren have to master as well as the phrase

responsibility for a common good. in this way, inadvertently perhaps, i think that the texas board not only launched in the culture wars but also brought the curriculum in line with the states unequal social order. with its flaws a very corporate climate and endemic human services, texas simultaneity leads the nation in carbon emissions and children without health insurance. texas may be wide open for business as the governor's economic developer office proclaims, but it has always had an uneasy relationship with lady justice. this is clearest of all in the criminal justice system. which in texas has tended to struggle to privilege de rossi over fairness, revenge over rehabilitation. according to a new survey by the pew center on the states, texas that has the largest penal system largest penal system in the united states with 171,000

inmates, having outstripped california that draws from a third larger population. weak protection for indigent defendants, hard driving prosecutors, and a mile-long scroll of 2324 separate felony statutes have combined to produce convicts in texas by the busload. at the state leads not just in scale, but in severity as well. its inmates serve exceptionally long sentences, and i'm in a condition of geographically isolated facilities. by day they are forced to work without even the token wages to spend and other states. by night they report the highest rates of sexual assault in the nation. 20,000 of them serve time in private lockups that profit by spending as little as possible on guard salaries and prisoner welfare. that's more than any other state in the country. a record 10,000 texas inmates languish in super max isolation

cells that wall off their inhabitants from virtually all human contact. roxana who was recently released from a prison in iran talks about in her memoir going crazy after two weeks in solitary. texas inmates are held in equal or harsher conditions of isolation for months, for years, and for some instances for decades that most notorious and, of course, texas leads the nation and capital punishment. having carried out 452 of the nation's 1200 executions since 1976. another measure of texas' singularity is its frequent review come by federal judiciary. in recent years appellate justices have backhanded the state's hardline elected magistrates for approving the execution of juveniles and eventually retarded, for refusing to release an inmate who was twice approved innocent by dna testing, for declined to

order a new trial when it was discovered that the dea and the judge had been sleeping together for allowing a lethal injection to go forward because the attorneys nearly missed a 5 p.m. filing deadline. just on march 25, the supreme court had to step in to stop the execution of hank skinner because prosecutors had refused for years to conduct dna evidence on physical evidence from his crime scene that could prove his innocence. the confluence of these factors, that i can't texas tough made the state an outlier for most of the 20 century. texas prison are distinguished by almost unable backwardness. when hundreds of prisoners begin be laid themselves in the 1940s to protest over work and mistreatment, investigate and convict living in a state of deathly fear and violence, and make comparisons to gentleman and japanese pow camps. but in the turbulence of the

civil rights era, many of texas' shortcomings came to be regarded as virtues. as criminal rehabilitation programs came under attack under the left and from the right, as prison costs and disorder mounted, from the late 1960s corrections officials from across the country flock to huntsville to study the states highly recommended cost effective control model. two directors of the state prison guard as he were elected president of the american correctional association. one of whom we wrote the organization's centennial principles that are used as a blueprint for institutional accreditation. incenting other states began mimicking texas is unyielding approach to juvenile crime repeat offending and narcotics. once dismissed as barbaric, texas became a beacon, not just in criminal justice but in politics as well. in previous eras americans looked to new york or to california for leadership during

the resurgence of conservatism, another term added to the texas curriculum by the way, americans increasingly looked to texas with its mythic history and subversive population and sweeping territory that extends from south to west, it has become a for better or for worse america's new bellwether state. in the book, "texas tough" i examine the development of the state uniquely harsh approach to punishment and attract the causes and consequences of its oversized political influence. it's a solo show of political history but also animated by true questions of i think of huge national importance. first, why isn't the united states has built the largest penal system in the world in both absolute and per capita? on deskilled unrivaled in history of democratic governance. one indicator with 2.4 million americans now under lock, the u.s. imprisoned almost 1 million more people than china, and

authoritative state with four times the population base. second, how is it that measures of racial in criminal justice have widened over the past two generations? in the middle of the last century, before montgomerie, before the march on washington, before the civil rights act, after that americans were going to present at about four times the rate of whites. today they're going to prison at almost seven times the rate of whites. almost double. until recently social scientists have been curiously reticent on the second question, but they have provided legion answers to the first, as to why it is the u.s. has built such a massive and exceptional prison system. law and order conservatives had definitive expansion of incarceration as a reason and effective response to elevated postwar crime rates. but they have failed to explain why other countries, notably canada, successfully lowered crime with no comparable prison

build a. in fact, new york is another case study against texas crime has dropped in the much more precipitously than it has in texas, and all the prison system has grown dramatically in new york, it hasn't grown with the same steepness or severity as it has in texas, not even close actually. >> political economists tend to blame dean to blame demutualization or restructuring of the bottom of the labor market from which most prisoners hail. or they point to the emergence of what they call a self-sustaining prison industrial complex akin to the military-industrial complex that president eisenhower warned against. but here again they have difficulty explaining america's exceptionally punitive response to the unexceptional of corporate globalization, even more difficult, frankly, proving that for-profit punishment copies have a significantly positive effect across multiple jurisdictions. one prominent criminologist

claims that what they call the civilizing process has reversed course indiana state. another gale mack is going to dr. duffy political convergence between the united states and europe as a framework but neither of them explain why the u.s. diverge dramatically from its own past and from its allies, when it did. all of these contributors at important pieces to the puzzle, but in my view the literature has failed to fully explain the severity revolution in criminal justice and social welfare policy, largely because it has failed thus far too content adequately with history, region and race. history, because most accounts plan no further back than the 1960s. so that widespread incarceration from the ether. region because almost all analysts sideline the rule of the state of the federal confederacy were it germinate and grow stronger as.

and raise because everyone agrees that it is an important veritable. relatively few have gone up on the deeply entwined history of criminal justice and racial subjugation as a way to make sense of the present ,-comthem with some new exceptions. in my own work, i have tried to bring these three factors to the floor, to expand the frame of temporal analysis to encompass the full history of the prison from genesis to metastasis, from the original era of unfreedom in america, slated to our own moment of unfreedom mass incarceration. to contend fully with the southern roots of america's exceptionally punitive social policy regime homing in specific on texas grounded of the prison boom, and to take seriously the regressive rift in the u.s. race relations, especially in criminal justice. to make sense of the fact that 55 years after brown v. board

of education african-american and indian essays are more likely to go to britain and the are to graduate from college. heretofore, the literature of the prison, the historiography of the prison have been remarkably parochial centered in the northeast with california tossed in as michael mentioned that you open a was a book on the subject and the story begins with the birds of the penitentiary, the citadels of the light but that weren't meant to restore wayward citizens. and the story tends to calm it with the development of modern correctional institutions that me with parole and counseling. the perspectives very certainly, but the plot lines are virtually indistinguishable. this kind of their own is, and geographic parochialism i think made sense as long as a knowledge is and practitioners were claiming whatever the shortcomings that reclamation of criminals, were their goal. but now that the country's

prison establish it largely abandoned the pretense of rehabilitation, now that we encountered acetate rather than treat, it's easier for us to see that a counter tradition of public vengeance, of the corporal the basement and labor exploitation and racial division has always been present, if not dominant, and it's easier or us to see that criminal justice policy innovation have not just in from north to south but increasingly and in reverse. in texas, and in other southern states, disciplinary practices developed not in factories or quaker meeting houses but on cash crop plantations staffed by forced labor. police organizations took hold not to the rabble but to catch in brutalizing sleighs. but or in texas, the cost of the revered texas rangers, the oldest law enforcement body in a state. the law in the south generally promoted not equal citizenship

but rigid bifurcation by the free and entry, between white and black. by the middle of the 19th century most other states have built penitentiaries but the reserve almost exclusively for whites. according to most and i don't penal code, slaves in free blacks, as one expert on lauper, the slaves could be reached only through his body. the civil war tore apart a slave societies that had taken root on american soil. but as white supremacists on their way back to power at the end of reconstruction to what can only honestly be called the most sustained and successful campaign of terrorism in american history, a two-tiered social structure reemerge. jim crow segregation posted by jim crow justice. tens of thousands of former slaves who lost their freedom generally for petty crimes, one fella got two years for stealing a pair of shoes.

another five years was getting a bushel of corn. while kkk murderers very active in the state at the time went three. but as white court produced record numbers of black felons come in the new prisoners were not march to the penitentiary. instead southern states turn to a little in the 13th minute of the u.s. constitution which prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, except for punishment of the crime. strapped for cash but determined that unruly negroes be punished, they regard as dangerously free from the restraints of their masters, southern states therefore begin hiring out their convicts to the highest bidder to railroads, to mining companies, and to planters who paid little for the charges and less for the upkeep, but nonetheless forced prisoners to 12 from sun to sun without remuneration. this practice was known as convict leasing.

it filled state coffers, providing the majority of state revenue in many years, while generating absolutely tremendous profits for some of the most powerful and wealthy men in the post bell himself, men like edmund richardson, a mississippi known as the largest cotton planter in the world. like nathan bedford forrest, a slave trader who rebuilt his fortune with convict railway workers and founded the ku klux klan. like arthur saint clair who built the south first fortune 500 company, tennessee coal mine in really. and him like colonel edward cunningham, texas is sugar cane again the rebound less sugar gold coast sugar industry that had collapsed after emancipation. prisoner labor thus help to rebuild the south just as slavery built the old south, but at tremendoutremendous cost. broken families, arrested economic development, shattered lives. in the archives, which are surprisingly rich considering

that prison into strip inhabits a voice and agency, and painstakingly printed clemency petitions in official complaints that more often brought punishment then redressed, and exposé smuggled out of newspapers, in scratchy musical recordings and in scores of investigative reports prepared in response to countless outraged that in all these collections, in state capitals richmond to austin, you can almost hear the cry of forsaken prisoners sold into what douglas blackmon called slavery by another name. pressures have scurvy so bad their teeth are falling out reported one letter that caught my eye. another described working in the winter mind without shoes and till frostbite set in. black women prisoners decried masculinized in field labor, floggings on the bare flesh and sexual relations with contract guard. are a handful of why women incarcerated taxes and/or mostly locked up and ignored, at least by their account.

at a male wood chopping camp near dallas that was set up to provide tears for the railway, one of texas is first continental links, state inspectors found poultry rations, filthy housing and epidemic illness. but the contractor in charge, jh randell tolerated no excuses for missing work was. three quarters of a court of word a day for whites, a full cord a day for blacks. according to another guard, he with men with branches for claiming sickness when a native american convict slumped over a log in somersaulted, randolph reported ktm fishes and forced him to work anyway. the next morning the prisoner was day. another one got pummeled with an ax handle. he died afterwards, explained an officer. he was beaten because he couldn't find his hat. this was a common fate in this particular camp on a force of 80 prisoners, 18 have died in four months. across the south prisoners were worked to exhaustion and frequently to death, then buried

answer mostly where the drop in a railroad bed, on the levees, in the field. in tennessee, enterprisenterprising lassies did how to prophet isaiah every stage at the lewd conduct into coal mines, collected barrels of their urine to sell and winner charges expired by the hundreds, they sold their bodies to the medical school at national. and total the fatalities associated with convict leasing exceeds 30,000, about six times the toll, the best estimates of the total of lynching which developed at the same time and has received more attention by scholars. convict leasing because it undermined free labor, because as bond premium scandal generated fierce opposition from labor unions, church leaders, newspaper reporters, love women and modernize off all stripes who finally were able to force the abolition of the practice about half century after it began in the poppers and progressive interest.

but contrary to the expectations of reformers, southern states did not reassert control over their convicts and start building northern style education oriented reformatory like l. myra that was popular in new york at the time. instead, most state governments said they took over the labor camp of the former less these. minded out them in tennessee, levy cans in louisiana, chain gangs in north carolina and georgia, plantations in texas, arkansas and mississippi. and carried on their operations as before without the middleman. in this way southern feel institutions carry forward a little system that had vanished everywhere else with emancipation. ganged labor production propelled by with instead of wages. the prisoners that i interviewinterviewed started doing time in the 1950s and 1960s, and by that time in response to the scandal and spirited reform movement, texas had defined its plantation model of punishment and have adopted a

lot of the trappings of modern corrections, ged classes, concrete cellblocks and they room, good times appropriate already did texas department of corrections would be a national influence. it offered a stern economical counterweight to california's rehabilitative regime based on group counseling and in determining sentencing. prisoners though in texas at that time described rhythms of life passed down from bondage. i met a fellow who now works as a floor sweeper on death row, told me that when he first arrived in 1950 as a young man he was delivered in leg irons, change other prisoners by the neck. having grown up in dallas he had never worked in agriculture, but had the misfortune of writing during the harvest season at the clemens form, a plantation that have been in operation since the 18 '20s but that it never brought and a crop with free

labor. awakened at 3 a.m., and he go been a quick breakfast and was fast march into the fields by david was assigned to a work squad, had to stoop and pick and fill his burlap sack with brilliantly white cotton balls for the hold i, creeping down the rows until the sun almost set with on a short what they called johnny sack break for lunch at 10 a.m. he worked that day until his fingers were raw, but there was no way he was able to meet his 200-pound quota. and as a consequence he was detained at the back gate and missed supper. he found he said everything about clemens bewildering and shocking. the lack of privacy about the foul mouths and the stinging quirks of the field bosses, the demeaning nicknames bestowed by the guard, bug eyed, tar baby, learning what he described as his old plantation songs that helped ease the work and pass the time. by the 1940s, formal wedding

had been prohibited, but officers and more commonly their convicts enforcers known as building tenders engaged in a whole panoply of punishment for all manner of disciplinary infraction. for very cotton picking, a prisoner might be order to ballot for three hours on a two by four called the rail. forbade i a guard he might have to stay up all night shelling peanuts only to be encountered if you began at dawn. for a sold or for more serious, or more serious rule violation, convicts would lose points towards parole or get what they call it tuneup which involve slapping and verbal abuse in the majors office. but for something more serious, assault on a guard or attempted to escape from an inmate could extend expect a losing fight with the blood and gore and asked whipping which resulted in broken ribs and hospitalization to be followed by a month of solitaire which in those days was pitch black with only bread

and water. a descendent of slaves who had spent most of his life in captivity, and is currently doing 10 years, probably his last 10 years for a dui he got on parole, likened his imprisonment to slavery. so did most other prisoners of his generation. and so do many today. there are obvious limits to the metaphor, the status designation by conviction rather than by birth, the time limits set by senses, most of them anyway, versus the ability of slavery. the racially mixed population of prisons, however skewed they might be. but even some guards employed the same historical allusion. one african-american officer i interviewed told me that when he arrived at a texas prison farm for his first day of work he felt like it stepped in a time machine that had taken him back to the old south.

and my first started visiting texas penal systems myself i was struck by the etiquette, the assignment of your voice, high ranking officers, the depersonalizing all white dust off uniforms and, of course, the site of host squad comprised mostly of blacks and latinos tending crops under the command of armed white men on horseback. at first, during a texas prison can feel like a visit to a living history theme park, a grittier version of williamsburg. here, more than anywhere else in america, the lifeways of slavery are preserved. from the late 19th century forward, and a succession of reform movements have tried to dislodge texas is penal system from its slating foundation. in the 18 '80s labor unions thought and successfully against the use of the lease of convicts

two build the state capital after the first burned to the ground. and build a treatment oriented penal colony near austin, but they were undone by a recalcitrant guard and politicians, and not least prisoners themselves he took advantage of the subdiscipline to escape in droves. in the 1960s jailhouse lawyers or written letters as they known in texas brought conditions of confinement lawsuits, most famously the ruby versus case in federal court against tremendous odds, they won. but the state prison didn't shrink or even become a more merciful as they had expected. they simply develop more professional bureaucracies and gained larger budgets. from the 1870s through the

1970s, and knowledges and progressives believe that hardline plantation punishment was destined for the junkie of history. that southern would involve towards treatment and community corrections, that the south would become like the north. instead, the opposite has occurred. since the late 1960s, prison counseling and education programs have withered, special protections for juveniles and women have been eliminated, physical violence has declined, but super maxis released have achieved levels of isolation never imagined possible. what they call the pace of imprisonment have intensified. although it's true that plantation labor and southern institution has very recently become more rare because even without wages and without land cost, convicts quads can't compete against federally subsidized mega- farming. in other ways, in the elevation

of retribution over rehabilitation and the proliferation of senses that last a lifetime in the rising numbers of juveniles doing time and adult infinity, facilities, in the resurgence of capital punishment, and the performative the of teen obeisance tangentially alludes to the old south, the resurrection of striped uniform, hitching post and chain gangs, for instance, and not least in the advance of racial stratification, criminal justice across the country from new york to california, has become harsher, more southern. in the present arena we might say actually that the south won the civil war after all. the most dramatic change though that has taken place in america's criminal justice have to do now with severity, but with size. starting in the late accelerate in the 1970 and thens and '90s, most aggressive in the south and in the sun belt but also elsewhere, lawmakers shifted discretion from judges

to prosecutors. they created new categories of crime. enhanced senses and mandated minimum time served, especially respect to drugs. decorative all types of 30 released from furloughs to parole. new slogans dominate every legislative season, zero tolerance, truth in sentencing, mandatory system, victims rights, three strikes, and all with dramatic results. for almost a century the nation's incarceration rate has remained relatively stable, fluctuating with the unemployment rate or with wars, but mostly it remained in line with other industrial democracies and the u.s. lockup for all the other years roughly 100 f. every 100,000 residents. but in 1972, the u.s. imprisonment rate broke free from its historic baseline and begin to climb. at first gradually, and then arithmetical. by the end of the century it

reached 500 per 100,000 has surpassed 700 per 100,000 some southern states. one at every 71 in texas. in aggregate terms, the growth of imprisonment has been if anything more breathtaking. since 1970, the u.s. prison population has sextupled. with services accounted for three this of that growth. imprisonment expenditure, the fastest-growing line item in state budgets for many here have increased 44 fold and 70 billion annually, eclipsing higher education spending in california and other states. so many institutions have sprung up from coast-to-coast, there are now about 5000 of them nationwide that prison but has really come to define the public works agenda of the late 20th century. much like hydroelectric dams characterized the 1930s or interstate highways of the

1950s. contrary to predictions at the end of the civil rights era that america would eventually become as one a nation without prisons, america has become a prison nation. this hyperinflation and a hardening of the american criminal justice has many causes. but it has a lot less to do with crime, which mostly fluctuates independence of incarceration than it does with have to do with politics. in particular in the book i argue that in punitive term is bound up with the social formation that is always divided america's most attractively and that is always haunted our politics raise. put a bit too simply perhaps, when southern white conservatives were defeated on civil rights when they finally yielded in response and legislation passed nationally, they turn to law enforcement to

discipline the emergent social order that they had feared and that they had fought against. in the 1950s strom thurmond warned that the integration of the races would generate a wave of terror, crime and juvenile delinquency and when integration became a reality, he and other southern reactionaries pioneered legislation that augmented police authority that he and in federal judges, the same federal judge is ordering integration, and that ramped up criminal penalties. especially for property crimes and for drug crimes. as texas remove the last discriminatory statute on its books in 1969, for example, lawmakers signed in some of his in the early release of adult services for juveniles and other southern states did the same, such that the same jurisdictions that had fought these segregation most vociferously became the nation's most vigorous, in essence

policymakers institutionalized the views of texas' senator. and what he does i want to drive him from this country. this is in the way that we have undertaken a sort of racial banishment in the post-civil rights era. if present trends continue, a third african-american men will go to prison at some point in their life. of those who failed to graduate from high school, the fully 60% can expect to do crime. to do time. so many african-americans have lost the right to vote. more than 1.5 billion. that felony disenchant seismic is playing a role in close election, most notably in the debacle in florida in which fellow played in much more decisive role than hanging chads. this racial is a should of criminal punishment and historical lessons i think kind of hit me like cold water in the

face. when i visited a cellblock and an old plantation near galveston that was reserved for juveniles sentenced as adults to adult facilities. as i walked down the tier and past cell after cell after cell, i met the eyes of african-american boys of high school and in some cases middle school age, kids. many of them facing a lifetime without liberty. one day 16 year old told me he was doing, i asked him what his a sense what he said 99. at first i thought he meant months. which was a very long sentence for a child, the way the fellow looked to me. but, in fact, he was doing 99 years. it's hard. the guard, the guard choked up himself in memory. because he was explaining how this child's parents never showed up for his birthdays or

for christmas. and that he was lost to the world. and still, even though there's been kind of and actresses are these images and encounters i've had, they still kind of we're up and haunt me in my own work. despite so many of the horrors i've kind of put down on the page and would presumably have been put behind it, but evidently not. in the afternoons, these twins and teenagers attended classes in some cases, if there privileges have been revoked. that in the daytime, in the august sun when i was visiting during harvest season they were shoveling out to the fields to pick cotton, like the grandparents might have done as sharecroppers like your great, great grandparents might have done as slaves. quite possibly in the same fields. and it's important to realize that the troubling continuities

of racial subordination don't stop at the present date. against african-americans with criminal convictions are discriminated against in so many of the ways that their forebears were under segregation, ask conduct of certain types, especially drug offenders, are routinely and lawfully barred from areas turned away by employers and dan from public housing, denied college financial aid and prohibited from voting. for these reasons law professor michel a dinner in her new book, she calls it the new jim crow. i take a longer view of history and have come to think of mass imprisonment as a second retreat from freedom in american history. after reconstruction, white supremacist reconstitreconstituted and unequal social order through legal discrimination, pnh and convict leasing and let you. the slave went free, stood for a brief moment in the sun and then

moved back again towards slavery. after civil rights, all of the century later why conservatives have in essence reconstituted and unequal social order through criminal justice. the sun has set once again on justice. that term that texas pupil no longer have to contemplate. but there's another important piece here that helps explain why the south politics of fear and the action gained legs, partisanship in particular the great partisan racial realignment that has given birth to our own polarized present. in the 1960s, when crime rates went up and baby boomers became of age, as radical youth started chanting black power instead of we shall overcome, and essays from los angeles to newark ignited in the long hot summer, enterprising politician in the gop realize they could break apart the democrats stable new deal coalition with the rhetoric of law and order. order.

as barry goldwater first demonstrated taking a cue from george wallace and clearing the way for more successful campaign by ronald reagan, richard nixon before him and both bushes, republicans found that they could rally a just angry white democrats in the previously solid south and to a lesser extent in northern urban areas, not by talking explicitly about race, but by rating against soft judges, states rights, welfare and criminal predators. this southern strategy turned to the party of lincoln into a white man's party as a conservative journalist put it at the time. and also help to propel the conservative counterrevolution and social and tax policy that has reworked the sociopolitical landscape in the united states and the latter third of the 20th century. 30 alchemy of race and crime with the powering collusion of centrist democrats, the new right has turned the great society into a mean society.

the question now, at the start of a new century, at the dawn of the obama era is whether or not america's gift of counterrevolution, a counterrevolution that didn't force under route country and ronald reagan, and dramatically escalated the war on drugs as well as under bush the elder who employed the specter things of the black furloughed rapist willie to defeat michael dukakis, a counterrevolution that achieved unprecedented scale it must be said i under bill clinton, who tried to protect his right side by side every draconian crime bill that came across his desk. and a counterrevolution that reached its zenith under george w. bush who prided becoming present was no primary as an executioner and is a singularly averages are and who after 9/11 of course took southern style law enforcement to the world.

the quest is whether this punitive counterrevolution that is a symbol of the free world version may finally be coming to an end. there are scattered signs that it may be with the unsustainable costs mounting in tandem with the evidence of ineffectiveness and collateral damage, many states are starting to take a hard look at their bloated correctional bureaucracies that take you dividends in terms of public safety. in new york, politicians have partially rolled back the rockefeller drug laws. in california, facing bankruptcy, lawmakers ask them to release 40,000 inmates to comply with federal court orders about crowding and substandard medical care. in texas, still the most locked down state in the most incarcerated country in the world, rotation and parole reform signed reluctantly by governor rick perry has contributed a slight decline in the state in a population for the first time since 1969.

and at the federal level, the trend is also toward mitigation. president obama is expected this month to sign breakthrough legislation to reduce if not eliminate the racially divisive sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine, which has jim crow to the drug war to an extraordinary extent. virginia senator jim webb has introduced the national criminal justice criminal act which is not amended beyond recognition will launch the most ambitious policy investigation of america's criminal justice system from arrest to reentry since the johnson administration. all of these steps i think showed genuine promise, but after four years of boring on crime and building prisons much more on a modest budget driven reforms will be required to significantly reduce racial disparities in criminal justice and to downsize the world's

largest penal systems. to get smart on crime as they're just tough on crime as we have, lawmakers will have to have final columns and you'll have to make meaningful criminal justice reform a top priority on par with health care or banking regulation. the webb bill is serving a good place to start but after will have to extend well beyond washington. if the arc of history is to bend more towards justice as president obama suggested in his victory address, we will have to bend it. there was an epic freedom movement that was required to dislodge jim crow segregation that people said would rule forever, and i believe it will probably require another freedom movement in order to dismantle mass incarceration. thank you very much. [applause] >> you?

[inaudible] >> one is the idea of texas, to stand in for the sophomore jenna, i'm wondering if you could talk about the relationship the way texas place it in relation to other texas to other texas take. again, can replace taxes and what's happening there in a conflict of of thing about america's war prisons, you don't mexico mortar country in -- mexico border. talk about how your project can do that yet larger network. >> texas is a special case because it's the biggest, where the action is. but also because it is, it's a kind of southern state i think that lease in the criminal justice, masquerades as a western state. but it does have, it has more national element and has certainly had far more national influence than states like mississippi or louisiana or

arkansas, who might be the southern model of analogy as well or in some cases edited taxes, but who're always thought of as a backwater by everyone else in the country. but by the 1950s, especially in the 1960s that wasn't the case with texas. is the only state that kind of perfected this plantation management regime command lots of the knowledge is, conservative ones and politicians were calling it the best prison system in the country because they have the lowest rates of reported this order that was a whole lot of unreported disorder that was being, that involve conflict guard system that they kept largely hidden. so texas is a place come is a kind of bridge between the south and north and as kind of wave where you can see southern influence going going national. i think there is a kind of connection and a kind of

prediction of the stance that the unique stance is that states have taken in and counted these unique criminal justice and military challenges abroad in the wake of 9/11. but i think after four years of undermining the principles of innocence until proven guilty, four years of kind of undermining the promise of gideon that defendants would have adequate legal counsel, 40 years of extent of getting rid of rehabilitation and deciding that people were evil and need to be put away forever. also the death penalty kind of being resurrected, kind of created a toolkit and away that the bush administration, many of them the same operators who i've been with him in texas when he so lightly carried out a number of executions and sent a lot of young people to prisons. it is quite easy for them i think to extend this abroad.

i don't want to make the claim to strongly, but it's a factor, and many of the kind of tensions that are now erupting in the u.s. incarceration complex abroad from, stretches now from backroom, the rebellion that characterize domestically. i want to say one something about the tension. las. .

we've got more than 30,000 emigrants on any given day, kids and families. the vast majority of them not charged with any offense of more than being in a place that they according to the law on not supposed to be. other questions? >> you talked a little bit about how despite studies, the experts have shown the increase in

locking up so many people isn't necessarily having the desired effect on crime and safety, can you talk about why despite those evidence is still keeps happening and why you think that does happen? >> that's a very good question. the rise of the in first allstate in the united states has been undertaken in the face of very good evidence in that policy makers are not making decisions have will be fiscally or socially why this. every step of the way mandatory terms for all sorts of offenses the special property and drug offenses, three strikes which the actual results tends to be locking up senior citizens more

than the population there actually targeting cust those people have gone to prison through their old roles through their criminal prime. so it's a way that the problem we are facing now that politics has made it very difficult for the united states to face the formidable challenges that we face from health care to global warming for two generations the u.s. has shown it has not resisted the occasion to govern. has instead allowed -- it is governed by headlines and govern by imagining an attack ad and governed by the next two-year election cycle and with pretty disastrous results. yes of the reality of the matter is almost all of criminologists believe that incarceration has

reduced crime some, but it ranges from 10% or less to read most 25%. so that means it's an extremely expensive way to arrest and crime. if your goal were to encountering the problem of illegality, if your goal were to design the most expensive, the most wasteful, the most ineffective way to do with crime that's pretty much what we have done. >> i have two questions, to historical questions about things that are not often overlooked in crime that is crucial to understanding that legacy. at one is the beginning of the 19th century and you talk about in the book, i thought was fascinating, sam austin, that was one of the texas founders and one of the most notorious

criminals and that gets at the issue of migration and immigration and slavery, plantation owners wanting to move into mexico because slavery was still there. i wonder if you could say more about that. >> has an interesting and ironic twist to that. of, of course, the progenitors of the texas revolution much celebrated at the alamo and elsewhere for illegal immigrants in many cases because texas -- because mexico had been choking off slavery. there were agreements that allowed inglis to move into texas and to bring their slaves, it was a kind of tactic of the spanish airline mexican government to populate the area and protect themselves against comanches and apaches whose land was. but increasingly as and enlightenment, liberalism and

independent oriented nationalism came to the floor in mexico, the politicians turned against the number slaveholders and slavery was abolished on multiple occasions. stephen austin, the famous founder of texas, travel and was successfully able to kind of find loopholes to some of these prohibitions on slavery and that continued through the 20's and '30's but he was finally incarcerated in texas and held in an isolation cell for a long time which was a very trying and radicalizing experience for him. and sent him back to help start the texas revolution which was really the first war that white texans bought for slavery and, of course, the civil war being the second. you're going to ask another question? >> the other is about the beginning of the 20th century, my colleague and friends works

on campaigns but it is interesting at the juncture of violence as part of the criminal justice system and at that moment with sham trials. you could say more about violence, extrajudicial -- as part of the legacy of criminal-justice which is often overlooked and that might explain -- >> in texas history there are both a vexed relationship between law-enforcement and mob violence. you know, the people who were carrying out these pageants like lynchings in the late 19th and early 20th century very often put on the kind of trappings of tribunals and i thought of themselves and spoke of themselves proudly as enforcers

of justice. they believed they were stepping into augment the powers of a weak state and in some cases what forces stepped in and stop lynchings but in other cases they actively participated. this kind of continues much later than we sometimes think. in the 1920's when the new plan resurfaces, it had died out with the end of reconstruction, and is reborn in the teens and twenties after the birth of a nation became incredibly powerful, the most powerful political body in texas in the 20s. their focus really was overwhelmingly on law-enforcement and their gold in this new incarnation of the klan was two actually be a more respectable -- they participated in all sorts of extrajudicial

racist violence, castration some killings and whippings and so on. but they also imagine themselves as legitimately pursuing an elected office and there were very successful in winning share for assistant district attorney races and they marched under the banner law-and-order. if you go back and look at the campaign rhetoric of governor patten nest who was famously the governor when lead betty was in prison in texas, the one who part in him to a pardon. but he was the klan candidate for governor in his rhetoric of on the order was identical to what the klan was sitting at the time and it bears a striking resemblance to the sort of campaign slogans that have characterized the post civil-rights era. >> robert, that is a fantastic

talk and i really can't wait to read the book. i'm really on board with a broad frame of this movement from slavery to mass incarceration, the store you tell about the southern revolution -- evolution of american politics and the sort of call for new freedom movement. but one of the things i really wonder about and wonder how you think about and talk about it is the way in which the explosive growth in incarceration also does: for the transformation generation -- coincides with its own in which you have a bifurcation in which african-american communities, new kinds of access, obviously talking about the moment of obama which stands in stark at the other end of the story in some ways that the prison story, foment of the promise of policy. so in a sense of these things exist in this moment of time as

well explosive incarceration growth has also affected white, brown, probably to a lesser extent asian. so the growth of the numbers of white people in prison has also exploded. so how do think about this within that frame the? in other words, to what extent are living in a kind of new racial order or to what extent is this particular moment in incarceration signify something we maybe have not yet been able to grab hold of? >> it's hard to keep the variables in the air at the same time mature exactly right one way to do that is the way that a class and race has been entwined in the rise of criminal justice and have seen the decline of real wages over the same time. we have seen the weakening of

the social welfare states such a bad -- such as the conditions at the bottom of the labor market, white, black, brown, have become much more difficult than in other kind of economy is like the united states. so you have to think about those policy shifts in tandem. there is social welfare as the way that women are negatively affected by this conservative resurgence and imprisonment is something that is oriented primarily toward men although there are huge numbers of women in prison, 200,000, as many as the whole prison population in 1950. more generally there are a lot

of complications. we have seen great stratification within the african-american community and if you drill down into the statistics well the kind of profile of african-american student who is an nyu graduate are disproportionately arrested profile by police more likely to be convicted and then white counterparts a political and social station. they aren't going to prison in these kind of numbers that we're talking out today, that really is the reality for people who are suffering from chronic unemployment and low education attainment. that kind of democratic -- democrat and that's not escaping -- demographic that is not escaping from economic clutches of criminal justice. i will just say one more thing about this and you may have a good idea on this topic as well

which is a hard question, but iç think there are ways that slavery and racism presented the kind of most elaborate model of bifurcated citizenship in american history. first citizenship and then second-class citizenship and there are ways that a criminal conviction -- and i was in some ways wiped out by the legal arm of the civil-rights movement that did clear way to shore discrimination, but there are ways that a criminal conviction, that on coincidentally predominantly affect the descendants of those discriminated against under jim crow segregation but not exclusively are our new class of second class, second-tier citizens. there are ways that we subject

them to all sorts of exclusions that's just the desire to keep them permanently and a status of subordination. >> [inaudible] >> my question is you said that obama had recently signed legislation that was favorable to prison population. i am wondering if he is getting in a backlash from other rights were being soft on crime, if they're bringing that issue of? >> at the federal level not yet. although i haven't been attending tea party rally. but he hasn't done much yet in this area. he has spoken about crime on the campaign trail and take an even more so positions when he resisted legislator and a u.s. senator that exemplified in more

social democratic conception of crime than any democratic leaders in recent memory. he has taken some cautious steps declaring himself in favor of the death penalty and so on, but he has not yet whether by volition or by political reality not decided to protect himself from right to attack by trying to out tub the right on crime. and scared error: the attorney-general has been talking about trying to roll back the mandatory minimum penalties and lessen the number of peoples in isolation detention and the obama administration has been in favor of this crack cocaine compromise but should be mentioned that the crack cocaine think probably we're all familiar with it, but more than 90 percent of the

convictions for crack cocaine crimes even though surveys show that the majority of coke users and all its forms are white are blacks and latinos. so it has been the example in criminal justice that's the most like discrimination in our own time. now we know that there is no pharmacological evidence whatsoever for crack a more dangerous than powder cocaine. that whole wave of crack babies that we heard about in the 1980's it turns out gradually fas babies, there were fetal alcohol syndrome babies because the mothers were drinking alcohol at the same time during crack and actually it was the alcohol cause of the damage. linda pious famously died of a crack cocaine but it turned out to be correct -- powder cocaine overdose but the democrats were able to get republicans to agree to a completes equalization of

the penalties between crack and powder cocaine, the compromises that will buy rate treated 18 times were severely instead of 100 times more severely. there is no justification and there is no rationalization for that i know of that can be explained outside of a racist remark in a desire to cultivate whitethroats by locking away black criminals. i can't remember the question. [laughter] i got myself so worked up. about obama. it remains to be seen whether what will happen with jim webb's bill, it's been amended and was amended really horribly for a while and now it's a little better and you never know, of course, what monster is going to come out of the legislative process i have some hopes for it and some other people in the criminal justice advocate

community don't have much so we will see what happens. there in the back. >> first of all, thank you and i appreciated the talk for a lot of reasons. i want to go back to a point to make about the distinction between by conviction and by misfortune and the transition from slavery an arbitrary power to state power and presence. i am aware and am sure you are where there are people in prison who are innocent, forced a plea bargain to crimes they didn't commit, convicted based on snitches working for criminal enforcement, so the whole system is messed up. one of the problems i see as someone involved or was involved anywhere in the movement to reform prisons was sort of assumption that there'll innocent and that we base the movement for reform of criminal justice based on the innocence of prisoners and i happen to know -- in some ways first and a lot of folks in jail are not innocent been guilty of a crime. i guess i am wondering -- can we

solve the problem of criminal-justice and mass incarceration with some sort of claims to innocence is suffering people or doing need to talk about distribution of wealth and distribution of power and resources outside the jail but can we solid mass incarceration without solving the problems that lead people to convict crimes whether convicted of them are not. >> let me start on this and then you follow up. if i don't get to all of the elements. first of all, i think you're right, my research has prayer that primarily dealt with prisons but the more i read the more realize the problems in the judicial system is also at the heart of the matter and even though we did go through that time in american history or the judicial branch was for a brief moment on the side of the bacon said of the strong and a the

warrant and under the burnt -- war record and the burger court, we don't have anything like their play in our courtrooms across the country. this is something to the obama administration's credit, they're trying to fix with a big conference about indigent defense which is absolutely broken. it's broken much more severely in taxes than it is a new york. the plea bargaining system is turning out arbitrary justice, people are being -- even the people are guilty their scent for things they didn't do or crimes that might or might not be related to their actual conduct was. the shift in judicial discretion, the limitations on judicial discretion has made that ores by tilting the scales to prosecutors others all sorts of procedural inadequacies of legislation that went through in the '90s and stuff that has made it more probable that american

courts are convicting innocent people and in some cases executing innocent people including one of my informants was executed who i myself didn't believe his innocence, but it's been proven conclusively sense some of you may have read about him in the new yorker. so the question of fairness and in a sense are critical and i think that increasing the quality of indigent defense is an import area for criminal justice reformers to focus on because that's the way to add to reduce the prison population. my possible to get more public support for that than some reduction of sentences, but no, i don't think it will solve all of the problems. the escalating the war on drugs

is another area that california voters have the opportunity do something prius momentous next year with considering the actual legalization of marijuana, a drug that is by all evidence less harmful than alcohol. and try to change the way that we've done sentencing to undo some of the changes that have taken place over the years. i believe personally that we would be better off they averted their resources saved from downsizing criminal justice into the sorts of great society programs that the cost about commission proposed 40 years ago, the last time that american criminal justice was studded comprehensively by a blue-ribbon panel. although it is not -- i don't think that by increasing, by

alleviating poverty and doing nothing else is really not going to downsize our prison population right away because the relationship between crime and poverty is correlating but less than we might hope and more broadly the relationship between incarceration and crime doesn't correlate very well at all. so does need to be tackled with some focus on the apparatus of adjudication and punishment in addition to the social sphere at large and think. >> i want to thank you for this good presentation and doing amazing work on an area i don't think there's that much work on nasa's guard.

i have two questions. i think if you really want to highlight these moments in american policy and criminal-justice, what happens in the poster construction time with african-americans right being denied in the crawl justice system and the disenfranchisement in the consolidations and in the postwar rice area or have seen new rights and rewriting new laws, more impersonation and disenfranchisement again. i wonder how you see this to spectacular moments connecting? do you see them as a kind of backlash? are they related and in what ways are there related? is said that politicians in the post solarize era saw what was going on in the post reconstruction era? i am wondering because i've seen them before and was wondering how you do them. >> no, i don't think there was an awareness but securely of history by any of the actors

involved so because they are separated by 100 years we don't have a direct connection in that way, but one time in american history at the very much echoes in the other. the reason i sit it was important to go back to reconstruction was that it's hard for any of us to be able to step outside of our own historical moment and see it with any impartiality. we are overwhelmed by the details of everyday life and don't know which direction which are going and so it's hard for us to speak to characterize definitively our own moment in history and that's one reason i think maybe that racial politics hasn't been influenced -- emphasized as much in the

literature as a should be, but if you step back to this other arab that we can look back on with a great deal of clarity and you see the same kind of process with the same language develop, culminate and finally be undone, my hope is that we recognize is a shameful chapter in american history can be used then to cast light and provide clarity on our own moment and thereby hopefully show us in some dim way away board. >> [inaudible] i know you did a work in mississippi and also how to use the other kind of post reconstruction era, have you see these other -- other southern states developed the criminal-justice system and how do see that influence in the developer of texas? >> of those other states were

also incredibly reliant on convict labor. bolognese system in louisiana and large parts of the industry in the 19th century revitalized and the sugar industry collapsed with the end of slavery and revitalize only through convict labor. a lot of the wealth this, richest people who were able to rebuild portions consolidate their land holdings also benefited from convict labor, they use convicts as free labor obviously also able to have the kind of broader effect than just being used on any given day. it played a significant role in building the new south. convicts were involved in southern states' attempts to diversify their economies. one chapter it tells the story

of texas, building the biggest factory in texas in the 19th century that was supposed to free them from dependency on the north by producing iron products and that was going to use for white prisoners because it was supposedly less degrading then toiling in the fields. it ultimately was a total failure economically, and was a terrific for the white credit -- white prisoners who were all these memoirs of victimization in strange ways recalls slave memoirs. but all that to say across all these jurisdictions the penal system and especially in all the kind of local systems of crime with coercion thatç are related and orbiting around theç kind ç state cot[olled more formal penal system which does involve

felony convictions whether or not, it played a very significant economic growth and it remains for real economic oriented historians like gavin wright and others to crunch of the numbers in a way that figure out precisely how important was as they have done for slavery. there is another component of your question? anyway, it played a very big role in the states. louisiana actually has preserved more than texas. probably the prison and united states that is most like breyer version of colonial williamsburg, that is most like slavery is the angola penitentiary from baton rouge because there is this long serving morgan. , burl cain, who has accumulated a lot of political capital and own seems to fire him.

he is able to carry on after all the administration's like j. edgar hoover once was. .. >> any other questions?

go ahead. >> i'm what if you have shared your work -- pisa, a lot folks are familiar with the story and i think folks in this room are sympathetic. i'm wondering if you shared your research with prison guards or wardens and what have been their response to your kind of narrative of this process? >> some of that remains to be seen. i kept my cards close to my best western the research because i was able to get approved as an official researcher. not by being kind of dishonest about by being showing what i was interested in asking questions about, but try not to share with any of my interpretational framework. and i haven't -- one toward who helped me quite a lot has been in such. and i am sort of wondering when or if i should get in touch with

them. although one person who is very prominent has written me, and he says he quite likes, he quite likes the book. especially the parts i think he found interesting to read about himself, but also the longer, earlier parts he didn't know about. and i haven't yet been able to hear back from prisoners. all the prisoners were kind of deeply involved in this project, as informants but also in a way as advisers. because it turns out the ones that i kind of carried on the longest correspondence with were long timers who were kind of intellectuals themselves, because they were the ones who would kind of write me the long letters. so i was kind of sharing my ideas with them and they would give me their own ideas. many of which, you know, changed and made my thinking he called in important ways. so i'm very grateful to them.

and i hope i'm able to get them copies of the book. i'm worried about how it will go when i send it through. send them, send as many copies through i plan to. but i will find out soon. >> how do you explain the sort of funding for prisoner programs, and the kind of concentration of initiatives designed to the prisoners get books? i was struck by -- [inaudible] >> lifers or like that, but also the point that this isn't so discipline now.

isn't connected -- it would seem that there would be more interest in making sure there were programs. what you think about why those programs? >> the fact that we have died out is kind of systematic of the larger share. the huge amount of resources available for warehousing and punishing, and the smaller amounts of money, in fact restricted and reduced amounts of money for the whole gamut of programs that were designed to intervene in someone's life been convicted of a criminal offense and hopefully make them better. not that that always worked very well, but all those programs across the board have been cut back. now, with a second chance act,

very recently there is kind of more federal money coming into that, but we're seeing another round of cuts now with the financial crisis. there is not much treatment or education going on in the american presence. and, in fact, it's been cut back by -- it's not just that people haven't wanted to kind of continue those programs, but congress is limited the pell grants program, people in prison such that ged now is like as far as you're going to get, even though the pursuit of higher education was shown to have a very positive effect on recent ism. -- recidivism. they reduce the period of drug treatment. ever ever used all of the classes in texas back to kind of just basic letters and basic math classes, from what they

used to have. i mean, some of it i -- some of it is just kind of symptomatic of the larger policy shift. among veterans, conservatives, veterans and practitioners, there's also some awareness that, when california took prisoner education to its fullest development in the 1950s in the 1960s, they feel like what they got instead was a whole lot of incredibly smart politically conscious would be revolutionary convicts writing inflammatory best selling condemnations of their prison system, like george jackson and they got a whole lot of headaches as thanks for their therapy program and education

programs. so does not have been i lot of professional interest in taking a group of, you know, people who might be easier to go if they're sitting watching the jerry springer show which i found this quite a popular show when i was in the day rooms. in texas and some lower security units. maximum once don't typically have televisions. but then, you know, putting together a book groups. great. thank you very much. [applause] >> robert perciasepe is an american studies professor at the university of hawaii. his writing has appeared in the progressive and "the nation." for more information visit the website.

>> we are at the annual cpac conference in washington, d.c.. were talking to christian tappe of isi books. can you tell us what were your biggest sellers in 2009? >> yes. we had the book by brian. a historyf supply-side economics. that went very well for us. we also had rendezvous with destiny. that is the history of the night in 80 ronald reagan campaigned for president. we also had a book by matt spalding about restoring the principles of the constitution. and what you have coming up in 2010? >> we have a biography of william f. buckley called the

founder. we also have a book called whittaker chambers as part of a library of modern thinkers series, and we have a book called seize freedom. basically about restoring the risk rules of conservatism in the coming years. and, finally, we have a book called the closing of modern mind by robert reilly. which is about the intellectual differences between muslims and western christians and how that needs to be resolved before we go further. >> do you have any office or signing books books are today? >> we do. matthew spalding, he will be signing books, and also craig shirley who wrote a rendezvous with destiny. >> can you tell us about about

isi books in general? how long is the company been around? are the a part of another publisher? >> isi books has been around since 1993. we are part of the institute which does work with college students, college professors, students papers. isi books facilitates that, providing books with intellectual cultural events with the aim to help restore some of the culture that we have lost in the past 50 or so years. before that, isi also published books but not under our own publishing, go outside. since 1993 within independent within to execute itself. >> and is the ideological, is there an ideological concentration? >> yes. more bringing back the intellectual cultural underpinnings of the conservative movement. not so much what we need to do

now are taking action, but bring back the thought and the culture into the movement and just get people to think about it and think about topics were thinking being played out on the political level. >> thanks for your time. >> wesley smith, senior fellow at the discovery institute calls animal rights activism a quasi-religion that maintains equality between animals animals and people. the discovery institute in seattle host the our 20 minute event. >> thank you all for coming. it's always good to come up to seattle to the discovery institute to see old friends. i'm sorry that bruce chapman could be or who is the head of the discovery institute. i dedicated "a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy" to bruce and i would like to read to you that dedication. and i did so because of his

tremendous support he has given me over these years through good times and bad, and with regard to the project and my other work. and deep appreciation of his leadership, personal support and a biting friendship. i think all people were involved would agree with me that bruce is really a sterling leader and in his support and in his promotion of the work of the very svelte and serious things that discovery does. also really proud to be associated with the discovery. i'm not involved in, for example, the intelligent design issue but i certainly know that the sturm and drang, if you will, the yelling and screaming about it, the thing that i have noticed that people who work in that field here at discovery are maligned more than they are engaged. and i find that very telling and i think it's very disturbing. and so i just want, as chair

country and sarah palin, a shadow. younger than my generation, but i want to associate myself with the discovery institute. because the people here whether one agrees with them or doesn't, they have integrity, intelligence and commitment. so that being said, let's get on to the animal rights movement. how did i get involved in this issue of animal rights? it certainly wasn't something i plan. but one day i was out and i was speaking to an honors high school class. and i was talking about the importance of the universe of human equality, the importance of human exceptionalism. that is, the intrinsic height of human life. and of speaking in terms of bioethics. there's a bioethics that's probably the most famous, and i'm afraid that for reasons that will be made clear if humans, most influential thinker of our time