Book Review: C. Trulson and J. Marquart First Available Cell: Desegregation of the Texas Prison System Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009. xxiii, 277 pp. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-292-71983-5

• Author: David Ensley
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016810385197
• Published date: 01 June 2011
• Date: 01 June 2011
• Subject Matter: Articles

shaped by place because crime and punishment are experienced and made meaningful on the local

level, even when broad social and cultural changes are affecting institutions.

In conducting her analysis, Barker uses a comparative and historical methodology. The book

is organized so that after an introductory chapter, she discusses her key findings and theoretical analysis

before presenting each of the three states as a case study. A variety of data sources are investigated,

including archival material, citizens’ letters to political leaders, internal government report and memos,

written and oral public testimony, newspaper accounts, extensive secondary literature, and survey and

statistical data. For Barker, much of these data are underutilized in research but allows her to closely

examine connections between the state and civil society in the policy-making process. She uses these

data to explore the political structures and collective agency in each state.

In the case of California, Barker details how the penal regime followed a strategy of retribution

beginning in the 1960s in response to crime understood as a result of moral depravity and individual

failing. She finds that political actors in California operate within a neopopulist mode of governance,

with low centralization of political structures but also a low level of citizen engagement, although

affluent Whites participate through initiatives. This creates a penal regime with more exclusionary

conditions of citizenship and more intense state repressive powers often targeted at minorities and

other out-groups. However, the penal regime of Washington is shown to have introduced and

followed the principle of parsimony beginning in the late 1960s, a principle of relying on the least

restrictive penalties possible. Political actors operate within a more deliberative democracy mode of

governance, with low centralization of political structures but a high level of citizen engagement.

This results in a penal regime that restrains state coercion and creates more inclusionary but normal-

izing conditions of citizenship. Finally, New York’s penal regime is shown to have adopted manage-

rialism, a strategy that relies on experts and sorts and classifies offenders, sending some to prison

while diverting others. Barker explains that political actors in New York operate within a mode

of elitist pragmatism in which political structures have a high level of centralization while demo-

cratic participation is low. The penal regime may be viewed as pragmatic, but allows state power

to repress individual freedom, and creates restrictive conditions of citizenship. Barker concludes that

increased democratization, such as the inclusive deliberative democracy practices found in

Washington, can support and sustain less coercive penal regimes.

Barker details numerous key actors and moments in each state’s political history, including the

‘‘Three Strikes and You Are Out’’ initiative in California in 1994, the rise of victims’ movements

in the early 1980s in California and in the late 1980s in Washington, and the antidrug approach of

the Rockefeller gubernatorial administration in New York. She also manages to link the current

status of incarceration in each state with these past political moments. Her work is an important

contribution, opening up a new field of investigation that will be of int erest to both criminal justice

scholars and political scientists.

C. Trulson and J. Marquart

First Available Cell: Desegregation of the Texas Prison System Austin, TX:

University of Texas Press, 2009. xxiii, 277 pp. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-292-71983-5

Reviewed by: David Ensley, Florida Department of Correction, Tallahassee, FL, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016810385197

Authors Chad R. Trulson and James W. Marquart have presented an account of the long and

sometimes painful racial integration of the ‘‘burnin’ hell’’ of the Texas prison system. The harsh

environment and societal norms of the mid- to late-20th century made this an especially onerous

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