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
Book Reviews 219
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