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Re-imagining Texas as a Place of Harsh Punishment

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Prisons and Punishment in Texas

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology ((PSIPP))

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Abstract

With more than 550,000 people under some form of criminal justice supervision, and having performed its 517th execution in 2014, the Lone Star State has a reputation for harsh judicial punishment. Yet criminologists rarely take a state-specific approach to the study of punishment in America. Instead there is a pervasive tendency to reduce the complexities of individual US states—and their relationships with punishment—into a simplistic binary of Northern and Southern. The nuanced position that punishment (and stories told about punishment) achieve within the cultural production of state-specific meaning is lost in totalising arguments about an ill-defined Southern punitiveness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Hannah Thurston

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  1. Hannah Thurston
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© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)

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Thurston, H. (2016). Re-imagining Texas as a Place of Harsh Punishment. In: Prisons and Punishment in Texas. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53308-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53308-1_13

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-53307-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-53308-1

  • eBook Packages: Law and CriminologyLaw and Criminology (R0)

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