The Truth About Our Prison System

Is this the truth? I know it is something to think about!

Texas Tough

What is the relationship between slavery, Texas, and prisons filled with African Americans ? Daniel Bergner over at the New York Times did a review of “Texas Tough”, a new book by Robert Perkinson.

Bergner writes quoting Perkinson, “Race and slavery lie at the heart of Perkinson’s vision of American penology, and a profound dismay infuses the rhetoric of his opening pages. “Freedom is the United States’ founding creed,” he declaims in the book’s first sentence, and immediately he adds pronouncements from Thomas Paine, Andrew Jackson and Barack Obama making the same point. The oncoming irony is unmissable; there isn’t much that is subtle about Perkinson’s writing, and perhaps there shouldn’t be. Not only do we incarcerate at some six times the rate that Britain does, to take one example, or around seven times the rate of Canada, but, Perkinson relates, African-Americans are seven times as likely to be locked up as whites, and “African-American men today go to prison at twice the rate they go to college.”

You can read the full review here

Here is a link to the book on Amazon that will give me a little income:

Here is the author of the book speaking at a rally in Hawaii where he is on staff at the University: