Crime & Punishment in the Jim Crow South ed. by Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring

Abstract

Reviewed by: Crime & Punishment in the Jim Crow South ed. by Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring Max Felker-Kantor (bio) Crime & Punishment in the Jim Crow South. Edited by Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Pp. 240. $99.00 cloth; $26.00 paper; $19.95 ebook) Recent attention to the crisis of mass incarceration has led historians to rethink the roots of crime and punishment in American society. The burgeoning field of carceral state studies has produced important scholarship on the convict lease period following Reconstruction in the South and the punitive turn after the uprisings of the 1960s. Yet, the first half of the twentieth century in America’s carceral past, particularly in the Jim Crow South, has largely gone overlooked. Amy Louise Wood’s and Natalie J. Ring’s nine chapter edited collection provides a needed addition that bridges the convict lease era with that of mass incarceration. Framed around two broadly defined features of the criminal justice system, Crime & Punishment in the Jim Crow South presents a nuanced argument about the South’s distinctive criminal justice system in areas of policing, incarceration, and capital punishment. The region’s suspicion of state power meant that centralized criminal justice systems developed slowly over the first half of the twentieth century as the Jim Crow South modernized. As southern progressives managed a modernizing region reform brought greater state centralization to the criminal justice system. Government oversight, however, did not challenge Jim Crow. Rather, “Criminal justice served to bolster the racial hierarchy in the face of these changes associated with modernity” (p. 6). The mechanisms that facilitated entrance into southern criminal justice systems explored in part one offer insights into the contested history of southern policing. Despite legal segregation, southern police forces were not all-white. As K. Stephen Prince shows, Black police officers in New Orleans who joined the force during Reconstruction presented a challenge to white supremacy’s supporters. Would they support the police or racial order? Using the trial and [End Page 532] removal of a Black officer, George Doyle, for the killing of a white bar owner, Prince shows how “the lines of race proved more enduring than respect for the authority of the police” (p. 23). For the police to become a modern instrument of racial control, in short, it had to be made white. Despite the consolidation of white police forces, African Americans routinely tried to make the police arm of the modern state work for them. As Brandon Jett and Silvan Niedermeier reveal in their respective chapters on homicide investigations and police torture, Black residents attempted to use the police to advance their own interests within the confines of Jim Crow. African Americans in Memphis called the police, acted as witnesses, assisted officers in gathering evidence, and, at times, apprehended suspects. In contrast, as Niedermeyer shows, African American challenges to police torture served as a catalyst for organizing and the foundation of the long Black freedom movement. Just as African Americans attempted to make the state work for them, Jim Crow shielded white criminals from prosecution, as Tammy Ingram demonstrates in a chapter on organized crime in Phenix City, Alabama, that mirrors Khalil Muhammad’s description of the disappearance of the white criminal in the urban north. Efforts to root out organized crime did not lead to the arrest of whites but produced a new means of racialized control in the form of law-and-order politics. Modernization and progressive government reforms released the powers of white supremacy to police African Americans with the backing of the state. The modes of incapacitation developed in response to state centralization, modernization, and progressive reforms unique to the Jim Crow South. However, as the authors in part two show, the criminal justice system not only responded to reform but was a causal factor in the consolidation of an updated system of racial control. As Amy Wood suggests, South Carolina governor Cole Blease resisted centralized state power but employed a liberal use of the pardon to push [End Page 533] forward penal reform and reinforce the populist and personal control over African Americans rooted in racial paternalism. Or, more...