He is the author of Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire (2010) which received the 2011 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award.
At the University of Colorado at Boulder, Perkinson received his Bachelor of Arts with honors in History, with a minor in Ethnic Studies in 1994.
He attended Yale University and earned his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in American Studies, where he also co-founded the Student Legal Action Movement.
[2] He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in areas such as crime and punishment, Southern and Western history, race and class, and American empire.
In 2014, he was involved with the State of Hawai‘i's and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s efforts to host the Obama Presidential Center in Honolulu.