 Welcome back. This is the 19th show in the series Rehabilitation Coming Soon, where we have been discussing mass incarceration in Hawaii and throughout the United States. My name is Bob Merse. I'm the host for today's show and for next week's show, sitting in for our normal regular host, Aaron Wells, who's on summer vacation. My guest today is Robert Perkinson, who is a professor at the University of Hawaii, and we're going to be talking about his book, Texas Tough, The Rise of America's Prison Empire. Before we begin the discussion, let me tell you a little bit about Robert Perkinson. He is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii at Minoa. He received his BA degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder and his PhD from Yale University. He has been teaching at the University of Hawaii both in American studies and at the law school. He has a wide range of interests which include racial relations during the age of Obama, the World Bank, unexploded ordinances in Laos, Anglo-Saxon American history, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Boston Review, The Progressive, The Nation, and many other publications. We're here to talk mostly about his book, Texas Tough. Before we do, let me just tell you the book received incredibly great reviews when it came out. The New York Times said it's a searching history of American incarceration, an important reckoning, an alarming indictment built on passion and exhaustive research. San Francisco Chronicle called it compelling, a gripping history lesson and a fascinating read. It got terrific reviews from just about everyone, and it won many awards including the Penn American Center's John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Best Book of Nonfiction, published in 2009 and 2010. So we're really lucky and fortunate and pleased and honored to have Robert Perkinson as our guest. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Pleased to be here. How did you come to be interested in writing a book about the rise of America's prison empire? It was partially timing, I think. When I first went to graduate school in the mid-late 90s, it was right when prison growth in America was peaking. So thousands of more people were going into prison every year than were getting out. Higher education expenditures were being eclipsed for the first time by incarceration expenditures. We're really making the kind of final stage of the shift from a focus on the kind of great society soft programs to what in a feeling like was a kind of mean society of punitive solutions to intractable social problems. So I wanted to figure out what was going on. You know, why was the U.S. the world's oldest democracy incarcerating a greater share of its population and also had a greater aggregate prisoner population than any government in the history of democracy? More prisoners than autocratic countries like China, by far. And also the other riddle that I wanted to wrestle with had to do with race relations that, you know, measures of racial disparity in criminal justice at the height of Jim Crow segregation were lower than they are now in the age of Obama after the tremendous epic successes of the civil rights movement. So somehow our criminal justice system became measurably more racially discriminatory and inflated it at an unprecedented rate compared to its own history and other democracies. And I wanted to try to figure out how that possibly could have come to pass. Okay, and you used Texas as an example. Yeah, I mean, I pretty quickly started focusing on the South, although most of the research on criminal justice has taken place in northern prisons. But really, if you look at the stats where the growth was most intensive, the sentencing statutes most severe, racial disparities generally highest, though this was a national phenomenon, but it was most concentrated in the South. And the more I looked, the more I found that all roads really led to Texas. That was really the epicenter of harsh prison conditions, rapid growth, prison privatization, lockdown, supermax incarceration, and a revival of capital punishment as well. And when your book is subtitled The Prison Empire, what does that refer to? Kind of had a double meaning for me when I was writing the book in the wake of the war on terror and the Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo scandal. On the one hand, the U.S. had built these just colossal institutions, a number of institutions. Prisons and jails became the sort of public works legacy of my generation, like interstate highways were for the 50s and 60s and all those New Deal projects were in the 1930s. That's what we built, and we built thousands of them in the United States in the 90s and in the early 2000s. So one was the creation of a kind of institutional empire within state, local, and national governance that now devours like $70 billion a year and restricts the liberty in one way or another of about 6 million people, 2 million of them roughly actually held in cages. On the other hand, with the Iraq war and the establishment of this kind of set of penal institutions mostly outside of the law or created under their own kind of unique regimes of military and national security law, we saw ways that the kind of prison sort of became an export and became implicated in American foreign policy as well. So in both of those senses I was kind of interested in how one, how this southern, severe criminal justice system became so big in the U.S. and then how we started seeing its manifestations abroad. Hawaii has not exactly been exempt from that national phenomena. We have a few statistics. Maybe we could put them up and just touch on them very, very briefly. Here's one. Hawaii has about the same number of prisoners as Sweden even though Sweden has about six times as many people as Hawaii. Our incarceration rate is about 405 prisoners per 100,000 population whereas Sweden has about 55. Those are pretty devastating statistics, I think, to think that we're such a small state really, an island state, and yet we incarcerate more of our people than in raw numbers in Sweden. And those numbers are low compared, what's amazing about it too is those numbers are so high by global standards, higher than countries like Iran, Hawaii's incarceration rate is, and yet compared to other states in the U.S., it's really quite moderate. We still have indeterminate sentencing, we have active parole, we have a, you know, compared to other places, more rehabilitative programs than some other states, and yet, you know, we've got these terrible racial disparities with Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. And so, you know, that's become part, and Hawaii really has the chance to be a leader in the way out of this, I believe, we just have yet to exercise the leadership potential we have. I'm with you on that. We have a couple of other statistics just to touch briefly. And I met with the direct, the statistician recently for the Department of Public Safety and looked at these numbers. In 1977, and I had just come to Hawaii about six years earlier, we had about 398 prisoners, and by 2016 it goes up to 5,800, a 1359% increase, which certainly talks about the rise of the prison empire here in Hawaii. And this is, this is a statistic when I, when I found it really astonished me. We have about 5,800 people behind bars, 1,500 on parole, but 20,000 on probation. So a total number of people under some form of correctional supervision of about 28,000, which is more than the entire population of Kahalui Maui. So, you know, we have not been exempt from the prison empire for sure. In researching your book, you spend a lot of time talking to inmates. At one point you wrote, and I wrote this down, when you sit down and talk to inmates about their lives, you soon discover that what unites them most of all is pain. Pain that they have soaked up as victims and pain they've inflicted on others. And then you go on to talk about Kimberly Lavelle, I think is her name. And you say that she has suffered more than harmed. And that last phrase cost my attention because we've had a number of people on the program who have talked about how trauma of some form, whether it's physical, mental or sexual, seems to be a common thread running through the lives of so many prisoners and something we need to address if we ever want to change their lifestyle. I wonder if you could just, you've seen a lot of that. And there's good evidence on that that some of the most, at least crime like drug addiction and some other social programs is a difficult one to attack with public policy because there's a lot of causes, there's a lot we don't know socially and social scientific terms about it. But in very long term studies, you know, we know that some of the most effective interventions are ones you wouldn't necessarily think of first when it comes to crime. When it comes to crime, you think about surveillance cameras, police, deterrence, lighting, things like that. But, you know, quality preschool can actually move crime rates more than those interventions that, you know, take place after someone and preventing child abuse. Because I was amazed by the kind of dozens and dozens of prisoners that I interviewed, some of them for hours and hours who really poured out, you know, amazing and poignant life stories to me. How much those stories started to echo one another. Like, so many male prisoners, one of their first memories is of their seeing their mother being beat up. You know, by a boyfriend or their father and, you know, being hit themselves. So many women in prison, one of their most powerful kind of childhood or adolescent memories is being molested or raped and or beat up. So, you know, many of these people make terrible choices and not everyone who goes through terrible experiences as a child ends up committing crime or ends up behind bars, guilty or innocent. But, boy, the statistical likelihood of having it more difficult to make it through high school and more difficult to make good decisions in relationships and more difficult to kind of succeed in the world out there, which isn't always forgiving of us, it becomes a lot harder when you've experienced that. So, really, sometimes I felt like I was in studying prisons. I was almost studying the wrong problem, like really maybe the interventions that we need are much earlier. Parenting and poverty and abuse and, you know, good healthy brain development for kids when they're little. And that seems to be one of the stories that we've heard in this series of programs. And a lot of people saying that until we start dealing with some of those things, even though, you know, it's kind of late when you get somebody at age 18 or 19 or 22 to change because they've got a long history. It's tougher. Not impossible, by any means. There's a lot of successful interventions. And what's unfortunate is that, you know, of all of the ways that you might deal with crime from very early interventions to kind of crime prevention, to drug treatment programs, to counseling, to kind of job creation programs and so on, what we've focused on over the past 40 years, really, is a remedy that is most expensive and that is not very effective, statistically speaking, in preventing crime, and has known negative external consequences. And that's incarceration. It smashes apart families and therefore harms the kids of the people incarcerated, especially their moms. It costs a great deal. If memory serves something like 60,000 a year in Hawaii, numbers are difficult to pin down, as I'm sure you're finding. You know, the effect on it does, you know, incarcerating huge numbers of people does prevent crime sum. The best statistical evidence suggests that the crime drop that we've experienced since the 90s, maybe a quarter of that can be attributed to locking up 2 million people, but that's a big social intervention that's costly and wrecks a lot of lives. The jobs afterwards, their families are smashed apart. So we haven't gotten much positive bang for buck and a lot of negative in focusing on one exclusive remedy. It's, I think, time for a short break here. So this is, we'll be right back with Professor Robert Perkinson. My name is Bob Merz and this is a rehabilitation coming soon, back in a moment. This is Steve Katz. I'm a marriage and family therapist and I do shrink wrap, which is now going to every other week, all during the summer and maybe forever after. Take care of your mental health this summer. Have a good time. Do what's fun and take good care of yourself. Bye-bye. Aloha. My name is John Wahee and I actually had a small part to do with what's happening today. Served actually in public office. But if you don't already know that, here's a chance to learn more about what's happening in our state by joining me for a talk story with John Wahee every other Monday. Thank you and I look forward to your seeing us in the future. We're back. I'm Bob Merz. This is Rehabilitation Coming Soon and we're speaking with our guest today, Professor Robert Perkinson. One of the stories you tell in your book is about a man named David Ruiz and his efforts to change the trajectory of our system by filing lawsuits and trying to get the criminal justice system to change that way. I was wondering if you could just say a few words about, there's a very moving story about David and his history and what you think about whether litigation is a model that works or... Good question. He was the kind of lead named plaintiff in what became the longest running civil rights trial and one of the most expensive prison rights trial in American history. It went all the way from 1972 up until the late 1990s, even after his death. The prisoners at that time in Texas really evolved out of a slavery Jim Crow forced labor system, but by the 1950s as the country kind of started moving to the right after in the wake of the New Deal and World War II, the civil rights movement notwithstanding, it became quite a stable system. They kind of grafted onto that southern plantation model some of the trappings of modern corrections and the director was very popular and became president of the American Correctional Association and kind of set the template for a more severe style of incarceration which would eventually become dominant in the latter part of the century. And prisoners had no voice in that, as many of them don't now know real redress or way to make complaints that could at all be meaningful other than through the courts and they had at times had sympathetic judges or at least judges willing to listen and so from the 1970s forward prison litigation became one of the most powerful tools to change the management of corrections and Texas was indeed changed a great deal so in that sense it's successful but it's like so many tools it's a tool that can have positive, even in victory, can have unexpected consequences and the Texas prison system became more professional, less abusive in some ways but also colder, more regimented, more bureaucratized, in a way more dehumanizing prisoners became less likely to get roughed up by guards or beat up terribly but more likely to spend huge amounts of time in solitary confinement so I found reckoning with the consequences of it difficult to know whether the not that they shouldn't have fought and they did and the lawyers heroically tried to attack really visible injustice as best they could but the end results were quite at variance from what they imagined they were trying to create I've noticed in my experience and I'm on the board of the Native Wine Legal Corporation we've had some lawsuits along those lines and it really puts the federal judges in a situation of trying to balance what they consider to be security concerns with human rights and it seems it's hard to get a good match and it's difficult for judges to, I mean if they intervene with enough specificity to really make the changes that need to be made then they start micromanaging a prison which they're not really equipped to do and because prisoners are kind of by definition a subject class, you know, they're difficult institutions to reform that way one of the things that's made that worse is that from the 1990s in response to all of these lawsuits as the kind of conservative revolution swept American politics a lot of legislation was passed especially at the federal level that made these sorts of lawsuits very difficult to win the prison litigation reform act signed by President Clinton in 1996 most notably and all of those prisoner suits that changed the way prisons are managed and made them more professional in the 70s and 80s would be impossible now so prisons have become much more opaque to us it's much harder for us to look inside of them and know what's really going on now than it was 20 years ago and that's because the attorneys are not able to do findings of fact anymore Okay, at the end of the book one of the things you talked about that was most interesting was, you know, looking at where we are now and the options for the future and I think you listed three, one being kind of expansion and doubling down on the current system another would be trying to go the rehabilitation route and the third was, I think you put it as the road less traveled and I wonder if you could just talk about those three as we in Hawaii start to look toward what's good for us in our future Well, because the, you know, we sort of take for granted I think in the U.S. how long sentences can be for crimes and the number of people that are incarcerated because it happens sort of slowly but in historical terms what the U.S. has built from the late 1960s, early 1970s up until about 2000 is really without precedent outside of totalitarian societies like Stalinist Russia or North Korea or something just the percentage of the population we've incarcerated no democracy has ever locked up one percent of its adult population as the U.S. has done we sentence people, routinely people in Hawaii even with the kind of meth mandatory sentences we sentence people for drug offenses in Hawaii for longer sentence mandatory sentences than Nazi war criminals got after World War II, regularly so, you know, and now the country has kind of sobered up a little bit to that you know, on the Black Lives Matter movement has really kind of brought to attention the ways that the criminal justice system has become a vehicle of injustice as well as justice and that racism isn't just lingering but very much active Republicans are kind of many Republicans, conservatives are awakening to the size of this kind of entitlement and the cost of this entitlement in effective government bureaucracy that they've created that goes against their kind of smaller government impulses but it would take a lot to dismantle something that involved so much money and took so long to build you know, the U.S. is a rich, so the options I laid out, the U.S. is a very rich country so we could, you know, as Donald Trump is kind of channeling Richard Nixon in 1968 and talking about restoring law and order you know, it's not inconceivable other societies have done it that the U.S. could double down and put more money into policing more money into immigration enforcement more money into incarceration seeking those kind of hard-fisted solutions to the social problems of poverty, unemployment, hopelessness, crime, violence, mayhem and so on another more likely possibility that the country kind of seemed to be going on is kind of trying to revisit these solutions of rehabilitation to education or drug treatment, job training rather than just incarceration and there's a lot of hope, a lot of those programs work but they can, the dangers they can sometimes be tinkering around the edges changing the kind of flavor of the system without really scaling it down and I guess what I hoped for is that we would really look for changing the subject and the orientation of the system a little bit more radically really looking to try to shrink the size of the criminal justice system shorten sentences, make sure prison is really a punishment of last rather than first resort make sure we're getting people out when they're no longer dangerous and devote some of those resources and more resources to other kinds of programs it's sometimes hard to have hope that all of this could succeed but if you look back at, I've taken some hope at looking back at in history because I'm a historian and if you asked people in the 1940s how long would Jim Crow segregation be the land of the law in the United States? it could have thought it would be another hundred years despite the protests because the Southern Democratic Party was firmly entrenched and firmly in power there was no signs of it slipping away same if you ask people about slavery in the 1850s slavery was the economic mainstay of the United States it didn't seem like it would collapse in the next 15 years and yet it did so history can turn very suddenly and there are signs of kind of discontent with the direction this country has gone over the last 40 years that I think give us some hope that we might be at a moment of fluorescence where we might see big changes ahead and hopefully we can be part of that in Hawaii I hope so too when we were in Norway we heard from one of the appellate judges from Sweden who said, you know, focus whose recommendations are focus on reforming and correcting your correctional system for sure making it better but don't forget you've got to attack it in the community you've got to attack he said you've got guns, you've got unemployment you've got racism in America and he said if you don't address those he said long-term you're not going to make the progress you really need to make right and we've got more, you know, I think we have more capacity to solve those problems and really be a model for the US Texas was the model for the conservative revolution and severe American criminal justice over the past 40 years Hawaii could be one of the states that becomes the model for leading us out of the darkness you know, we have a lower crime rate we have a pretty high property crime rate but a quite low violent crime rate compared to the rest of the US we're ways not as prone to kind of despite our differences racially divisive demagoguery and politics as some other states are you know, the aloha spirit and the culture of kind of trying to stay together and help one another has political salience here so, you know, we have an opportunity to do great things here and I have great hopes for the work you're doing that we might do but I agree with the judge, you know, you've got to really focus on trying to make the institution that exists the best you can but you've got to look at it in context too and look at early childhood education child abuse, education, economic opportunity and other factors as well we're just about out of time but I wonder if you could just say a word or two about the research that you're doing now oh well, I'm sort of shifting gears I became, I sort of have been fascinated by the rise of social movements that are happening right now Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Climate Justice Movement, the Bernie Sanders campaign and have sort of reflected on some of the failures of the radical prison movement in the 1970s and that kind of opposite happened so I've become interested in looking at the ways social movements have shaped the trajectory of American history it's pretty common that in history we tell the stories of social movements that succeeded Suffrage, for example, or the civil rights movement but many of the biggest movements in American history failed sometimes catastrophically so I've been looking at some of those from the Union movements and the kind of Pan-Africanist movements of the 1910s and the 1920s the radical prison movement, the Equal Rights Amendment movement in the 1970s and kind of thinking about ways that many of these movements might fail on the surface according to the demands that they articulate at the time many of the people involved might feel disheartened or broken by the end of it but, lo and behold, a lot of them have greater ripple effects than we might think social movements we've tended to study as animals instead of ecosystems but they're really wild, not domesticated animals and they're in ecosystems and change can happen in all sorts of unexpected ways we're going to look forward to that book when it comes out we've run out of well, but we're going to be patient and wait for it we've run out of time this is Bob Merce this has been rehabilitation coming soon stay tuned for our next show which is Sustainable Hawaii with Kristen Turner thank you all for joining us and look forward to seeing you next week thanks