James Hynes’s unsettling fifth novel, Next, captures eight hours in the life of “melancholy middle-aged” Kevin Quinn as he sneaks away from Ann Arbor to Austin for a clandestine job interview. Quinn is a bundle of neuroses—he’s worried about a recent spate of terrorist bombings, stalled in his editorial position at the University of Michigan, and fairly sure his girlfriend’s maternal desires don’t fit into his aging hipster fantasies. Killing time before his appointment (stalking a pretty young scenester who was on his flight, actually), he trips and ruins his job-hunting suit, which leads to the panicked suspicion that he should just hop the first plane back home. Quinn is obsessively conflicted—his semi-regrets about leaving his girlfriend behind would be more convincing if he wasn’t mentally looping a greatest-hits reel of his sexual exploits—and his self-absorption leaves him all the more vulnerable to the wake-up call he gets from big R Reality. Hynes is a scrupulous writer; the Austinite nails the city’s vibe as a magical land whose residents stay up late getting stoopid and wake up early feeling smart. But Next is more than a cultural travelogue. It’s a dervish of a tale that whips personal and social anxieties into an unforeseen, but perhaps inevitable, climax. Reagan Arthur Books, $23.99
In 1929 Dallas teenager Virginia Thompson fell into a fevered sleep for 180 days. Eighty years later that familial legend helped inspire granddaughter Molly Caldwell Crosby’s book Asleep, an investigation into the baffling disease known as sleeping sickness (technically, encephalitis lethargica). The affliction’s symptoms are unnerving to contemplate: Victims may fall into a stone-faced catatonia for days, months, or even years, aware of their surroundings but unable to speak or move. The illness infected nearly five million people in the twenties, killing about one third of them. Another third developed serious physical ailments and mental afflictions, and most were institutionalized. Crosby offers up seven case studies in an attempt to shed new light on an affliction that all but disappeared by 1930, but although she unearths some fascinating details, including a young patient who resolutely plucks out both eyes with her bare hands, her page-filling digressions are an irrelevant distraction. (New York City, she rhapsodizes, had “the ability to defy boundaries—below ground, above ground, under the water, and into the sky.”) Asleep aims high, but it never delivers the revelatory insight that might rouse it from its lethargy. Berkley, $24.95
Robert Perkinson
Photograph by Minako Ishii Kent
In Texas Tough, the Yale-trained historian looks at the explosion in modern America’s prison population. He finds the Texas penal system setting the pace in both the number of prisoners and the harsh conditions of their imprisonment, with the occasional surprisingly positive development. Perkinson is a professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii. This is his first book.
When and why did you become interested in prisons, perhaps the most unpleasant aspect of the criminal justice system? My mother’s parents were white Mississippians opposed to segregation—a rare breed—so I was always interested in race relations and civil rights. In college I started thinking about the politics of incarceration. During the administration of the first President Bush, the drug war was in full swing and prisons were going up faster than Walmarts. In many states, prison expenditures surpassed higher-education spending, so I focused my graduate school research on criminal justice and discovered that prison populations, historically, correlate only weakly with crime rates and that the rise of imprisonment since the seventies has been concentrated overwhelmingly among young African American men, a trend unexplainable by criminal offense data. My questions led me back to the South, where the growth of imprisonment has been most intense, and finally to Texas, which, in the prison field, is where the real action is. Texas is ground zero in America’s prison boom.
If not crime rates, what factors do you find relate to rates of incarceration? Over the course of the twentieth century, crime rates have sometimes risen with imprisonment rates; other times the opposite has occurred. Pundits claim that increased incarceration caused the crime drop of the nineties, but this ignores the long-term data, as well as international comparisons. In Canada, for instance, crime similarly fell in the nineties but with no incarceration boom. Crime can’t explain the fact that the U.S. imprisonment rate has quintupled since the seventies and that the United States now manages the largest penal system on earth, with 2.4 million Americans under lock and key. I think a political shift is responsible. In the sixties, conservatives, especially in the South, turned to crime as a galvanizing issue as they ceded ground on civil rights. As schools and neighborhoods were integrated, policing and penalties grew more intense. Mass incarceration is thus a product of the conservative counterrevolution that reshaped American politics from 1968 forward.
Isn’t it a good thing that 2.4 million criminals are off America’s streets? Yes, criminologists call this the incapacitation effect. It works better than deterrence and has been more politically fashionable than rehabilitation. But incapacitation has serious limitations. First, it works only while inmates are actually behind bars. Second, there are moral and practical problems in justifying penalties based on what inmates might do rather than what they actually did; in practice, incapacitation becomes a kind of preventive detention. Third, caring for potential criminals in cages is just about the most expensive crime prevention program imaginable.
What made Texas unique among the states in terms of the prison boom? Bigger and badder. Texas’s prison population is around 173,000, a figure that should surpass California as number one in the country when official statistics are released later this year. Texas also leads the nation in prison privatization, supermax isolation, and, of course, lethal injections. The state’s per capita imprisonment rate —639 per 100,000 residents—recently dropped but is still among the top four states’. But Texas is also interesting because of its contradictions. It’s a law-and-order state that has nonetheless produced remarkably powerful penal reform movements, including a nearly successful campaign by suffragists to turn Texas’s prisons into clinics in the twenties and the convict writ-writer movement of the seventies. Texas is important because it stands for the nation as a whole. If New York and California once served as the country’s bellwether states, Texas does today. Metropolitan Books, $30
Read a Sample Chapter from Texas Tough Chap. 1: Prison Heartland (PDF)
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