Reaching Back: Convict Leasing and the Trusty System in the Nineteenth Century

The Tennessee Convict War Gary M. Fink (bio) Karin A. Shapiro. A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xvi + 333 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper). A thousand masked coal miners marched on the small coal town of Briceville, Tennessee, on Halloween night 1891. There, they “treated” convict workers to liberty while depriving mine operators of their bound labor supply. This sortie marked the culminating affair of a remarkable series of events that Karin Shapiro persuasively describes as “one of the most far-reaching challenges to governmental and industrial authority in the New South” (p. 235). Simply by bringing this fascinating chronicle fully to light, Shapiro adds significantly to the literature in the field, but her contribution extends much further, ultimately helping us to understand much about the character of industrial and community relations in the small coal towns of the postbellum South. Over the past several years the study of southern convict labor has attracted the attention of a talented cadre of historians. In one of the earliest and most comprehensive of those studies, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (1984), Edward Ayers details the peculiar character of an amoral criminal justice system that entrapped accused miscreants and the abhorrent system of forced labor to which they were subjected following their conviction. Matthew Mancini’s indictment of the leasing system in One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (1996), is even more devastating. Ultimately, Mancini concludes that convict leasing was not simply slavery resurrected under a new name; it was much worse. Alex Lichtenstein added still another dimension to the story in Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (1996). Lichtenstein argues that convict labor played a key role in exploiting the mineral resources and building the transportation infrastructure that facilitated New South economic modernization. In addition to these studies, [End Page 587] convict labor systems recently have been examined in Texas and Mississippi, including the latter’s notorious Parchman Farm. 1 But Shapiro’s book is less about convicts and the circumstances associated with their incarceration than it is about political protest. The prisoners, themselves, are distinctively passive players in the drama; indeed, we learn little about the treatment of either convict or free miners. The author is more interested in the role of the state in New South industrial relations and the variety of strategies that laborers used to influence it. In the process, she tells us much about the civic culture and political behavior of southern workers. The basic story is this. For the residents of four small Tennessee towns located in the southern Appalachian coalfields, mining held the promise of their industrial future. But mine owners in these communities dashed that prospect by leasing from the state an ever increasing number of convict laborers. The Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCIR) first introduced the use of such bound workers in 1871, and the practice quickly spread as the supply of convicts grew. The Tennessee coal industry existed in a highly competitive, relatively limited regional market. It further suffered from inadequate capital resources and excessively high freight rates. As most operators saw it, the key to profitability depended almost exclusively on reducing labor costs; consequently, the allure of a convict work force proved irresistible. Not only was prison labor supposedly cheaper and more pliable than free labor, but it also had a depressing effect on labor militancy and union organizing. With the complicity of state officials, inmates could always be used to replace striking miners. Prison labor, then, became a panacea for the employers’ production and marketing problems. It would assure a substantial pool of low-priced bound labor, keep down the cost of free labor, and curb challenges to work rules. Understandably, free miners fiercely opposed a system of labor that depressed their wages and compromised their ability to negotiate better working conditions. But the use of convict labor also imperiled the economic well-being of town merchants and service...

Made in America: Race, Trade, and Prison Labor

The study of asylums and prisons in which society encloses its deviants, traditional preserve of sociologists and psychologists, has recently been encroached upon by philosophers and historians. O'Brien's work is a significant contribution to growing fund of historical literature on origins of penal institutions. Her extensive research is based on archival records of French prisons, statutes and published records, writings of both prisoners and reformers, and modern social theory. O'Brien examines three aspects of French prisons, first treating development of French penal institutions. Unlike most students of these institutions, she does not end her treatment of this subject with opening of first penitentiaries in I83os and I840s. Rather, she examines development of penal institutions from end of Old Regime until late nineteenth century. This chronological breadth permits her to trace evolution of other institutions of created concurrently, including agricultural labor camps, special institutions for women, transportation of criminals to Guiana and New Caledonia, and systems of surveillance and patronage which extended supervision of the dangerous class beyond prison walls. O'Brien also recognizes that much in Old Regime justice portended modern penology. The essence of new penitentiary system existed already in bagnes, or penal workhouses; brutal public executions so central to Foucault's work were a vanishing phenomenon before 1789.1 The second part of this work is an examination of nineteenthcentury prison organization and operation. The ideal of reformers was a prison system that would isolate inmates from society while immersing them in a rehabilitative regime of work, education, and discipline. But O'Brien determines that this promise of punishment remained unrealized. The administration of prison labor was turned over to private entrepreneurs who assigned work on basis of profit potential rather than for purposes of rehabilitation. Discipline was maintained by extracting fines from convicts' meager wages. O'Brien finds that provisions for convicts' education, also part of ideal rehabilitative program, were inadequate. There were few qualified prison teachers and elementary curriculum was supplemented with lessons on duty and self-restraint. The author states that most guards restricted their roles to controlling prisoners and, rather than serving as counselors that reformers had envisioned, involved their charges in corruption. Contrary to reformers' dream of reassimilating former prisoners into society, penal system's growing tentacles of discipline and control ultimately worked to exclude former criminals from society. Ex-

Review: Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith

Reviewed by: City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernandez Natalia Molina CITY OF INMATES: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965. By Kelly Lytle Hernandez. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2017. Lytle Hernandez's Cities of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles is a study of the rise of imprisonment, broadly speaking, and the [End Page 124] buildup of Los Angeles's prison system, which by 1950 was the largest of any US city. The book makes significant contributions to US history, urban history, the study of race and ethnicity, and carceral history. Incarceration is foundational to Los Angeles; the city was literally built by convict labor, which was perfectly legal under the Thirteenth Amendment's dual provisions of ending black slavery while allowing the use of unfree labor as criminal punishment. As a scholar exploring race as a relational concept, I am fascinated by Lytle Hernandez's account of how the history of incarceration affected racialized groups differently over time—and how the development of Los Angeles remains, in the aggregate, a story about power, domination, and race. Each chapter unfolds a story that explains how the carceral complex in Los Angeles expanded and shape-shifted in order to control whichever population had resources of labor or land that were needed at the time. The book spans three centuries, examining the workings of imprisonment at different historical moments, including Native American imprisonment beginning in the 1700s, immigrant detention of Chinese and moral panics over homeless white men in the late 1800s, the first cases of Mexican imprisonment and their connection to the Mexican Revolution, the growth and entrenchment of Mexican incarceration in the 1920s and 30s, and its overlap with the origins of black incarceration in the city. Starting with the first prison established during the founding of Los Angeles, and connecting the histories and experiences of racialized groups not traditionally examined together (including Native Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, blacks, and poor whites), Lytle Hernandez deftly demonstrates that imprisonment is much more than punishment—it is also a way of subjugating, plundering, and even disappearing groups not part of the settler colonial ruling class. Scholars have traditionally studied these histories separately, grouping them by time period, by distinct racial and ethnic groups, or by forms of imprisonment (convict leasing, immigrant detention). Lytle Hernandez's interdisciplinary approach, however, makes a compelling argument that they should be examined together, as all fall within the rubric she terms "caging" and the long history of white settler colonialism. Reading this book at times felt like stepping through the looking glass. Through her painstaking research and capacious theoretical framework, Lytle Hernandez has an uncanny ability to take what we think we know and turn it on its head. The story of Los Angeles, for instance, is commonly told as one of four distinct time periods with little connection made between them: indigenous society, Spanish conquest, the Mexican period, and the US conquest in 1848. Using her carceral lens, Lytle Hernandez fills in those gaps, demonstrating how legal systems in one period were transferred to the next in ways that kept the racial hierarchy of the region intact. For example, the use of public order charges (e.g. vagrancy laws) during the Mexican period (1810–21) solidified the control and racialization of the indigenous population that begun decades earlier, while expanding that control to include Africans, mulattos, and mesitzos. As these populations were racialized and marked as unworthy of citizenship, the category of "criminal" was neatly mapped onto the racial categories of the time. Under American rule, these same vagrancy laws increasingly justified a captive native population who could be auctioned to the highest bidder or used for work on a chain gang. That this all occurred in California, a supposedly free state, is staggering. By connecting the time periods, a unique move, Lytle Hernandez uses a wide lens to demonstrate how the creation and enforcement of laws through policing and imprisonment was central not just for the policing of racialized and landless groups, but also for the...

Thinking with the Nation"National" Literatures at the Cusp Sukanya Banerjee (bio) Critical discussions of the nineteenth-century nation tend to be anachronistic inasmuch as we retrofit contemporary notions of the nation into nineteenth-century politico-cultural formations. One can be forgiven for this anachronistic move because nineteenth-century literary and cultural history bears ample evidence of the singularity with which the spirit of nationalism imbued itself in and through aesthetic and cultural practices, be it in Romantic imaginings or the literary artifact of the Victorian novel. However, it is worth noting that the object of nationalism—the nation—remained considerably opaque throughout the century. Incidentally, while the French Revolution is widely understood to mark the point at which state power begins to affix itself to national sentiment, the sovereign nation-state was hardly a ubiquitous phenomenon until about the mid-twentieth century.1 But it is also the case that the nation itself was quite amorphous over the course of the nineteenth century. Even as Walter Bagehot authored a definitive treatise on what is a key instrument of nationhood, the constitution (in this case, the English constitution), he also mused: "But what are nations?"2 The opacity of the nation arose not so much from its mutability (changing borders) but from the uncertainty regarding its organizing logic. What was the coherent element around which a community imagined itself? Was it language? Was it race? How much could one put store in territoriality, which, after all, could shift? As twenty-first century readers and scholars, we are all too familiar with the artifice of the nation, the fact of its constructedness. But so were thinkers in the nineteenth [End Page 84] century. What does it mean, then, to read this contingency back into the nineteenth century, when nations were are at various stages of making, nonmaking, and unmaking? How does such a chronologically apposite view impinge upon our otherwise unitary understanding of "national literature" or "national tradition" that a post–Second World War critical and political legacy has bequeathed us? How might revisiting the nation in the late nineteenth century, at the cusp, in fact, between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reorient our thinking about the nation and the critical frameworks that it might generate? In addressing these questions, I want to consider analytical frameworks that might be apropos to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries given that this was a period that came in the wake of the Italian Risorgimento and German unification but also witnessed an upsurge in anticolonial agitation as well as colonial nationalisms that understood sovereignty and affiliation as nested, layered, and dispersed.3 The idea of the nation was very much in the air in Britain, too, where national sovereignty had been continually negotiated through franchise reform (the latest installment in 1882) and national identity found expression in patriotic jingoism attending the Boer wars. But the British nation was also inextricable from its empire, and if, as Hedinger and Hee point out, the tendency of "transnational history" is to "nationalize empires," such that "imperial history is read as the history of a nation-state beyond its borders,"4 then it is worth noting the inadequacy of the transnational as an analytical template in this context, not least because of the impossibility of reading the British nation as a discrete formation. In trying to read the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and the literatures and traditions that gathered under its rubric, it might be productive, instead, to consider theories of nation extant in the nineteenth century, which is to say, to read through the nineteenth century and with the Victorians—widely understood—rather than retrospectively superimpose our late twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical frameworks upon them. At one level, then, I am making a temporal argument about our reading of the nation, suggesting that while we tend to read back into the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nation and its literatures and cultures, we should focus instead on the nineteenth century and use that as a basis for reading [End Page 85] forward. Evidently, the famed temporal paradoxes of the nation inflect our reading habits, as well. But why focus on the...

Reviewed by: The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829–1913 by Ashley T. Rubin Erica Rhodes Hayden (bio) The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829–1913. By Ashley T. Rubin. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 356. Cloth, $59.99.) In 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia opened as a premier institution of the Pennsylvania System, or separate system of punishment, [End Page 398] in which inmates silently inhabited separate cells. Other states used the Auburn System, or silent system, in which inmates worked in congregate and slept in separate cells. In The Deviant Prison, Ashley T. Rubin combines sociological theory and traditional historical research to delve into the inner workings of Eastern State to understand precisely why the prison clung to the Pennsylvania System of discipline. In doing so, Rubin argues that Eastern State was a "deviant prison" because the institution engaged in an "open and routine violation of increasingly solidified national norms about prison discipline" (xxxvii), making it both unique and criticized. Rubin contends that Eastern's use of and defense of the Pennsylvania System rested in the hands of the prison's administrators, who chose this path "because the system offered them something—the means to claim a unique status—that was not available under the Auburn System" (xlii). Rubin's argument about the importance of status to the prison's administrators centers on Philip Selznick's institutional theory, in which the people involved with an organization "develop their own sets of goals for themselves in relation to the organization and for the organization itself" (xlii), which often depart from the organization's original objectives. Rubin dubs this "personal institutionalization" and argues that it is why Eastern's administrators promoted the Pennsylvania System despite the consequences. It offered an "advantage of difference" (xlvi). Rubin carefully uses public annual reports of the institution and personal papers of the administrators, such as letters, warden logs, and administrators' journals, to prove how they defended the system, even manipulated it at times, in order to maintain the unique status for their institution and themselves. The Deviant Prison is exceptionally thorough in design and detail. The structure follows the rise and fall of the Pennsylvania System in three parts: establishing the conditions for Eastern's deviance and for the personal institutionalization of the administrators, exploring the advantage of being different through both public and private avenues, and examining the process of deinstitutionalization and the death of the Pennsylvania System. Chapters 1 and 2 provide solid historical context for the history and development of the two competing prison discipline systems. The author then dives deeply into the argument that the administration continued to promote a romanticized version of the Pennsylvania System, even if the daily practices departed from the stated goals. Rubin demonstrates cogently how Eastern's administrators held much power and autonomy to make decisions about how the prison was run, in part owing to lack of legal guidance, thus perpetuating the Pennsylvania System throughout the nineteenth century. During the reform fervor of the 1830s and 1840s, Rubin contends that Eastern became a deviant prison in two ways: as one [End Page 399] of the few to follow the Pennsylvania System, and because it was "heavily criticized" through a variety of "calumnious myths" that the administrators countered (101), consequently entrenching the Pennsylvania System further. Once the administration invested in the Pennsylvania System, there was little choice to backtrack. Part 2 explores a central portion of Rubin's overall argument through an analysis of the administrators' public and private defenses and manipulations of the system to keep it in place. For example, administrators used a variety of "naming trends" in annual reports to "protect the legitimacy of the Pennsylvania System" and to combat myths about solitary confinement (145). This, along with the fact that the administrators characterized their system as "humane, benevolent, mild, and kind," allowed them to "revel in their difference" (174). While recent historiographical trends on prisons and punishment have explored the inmate experience, particularly that of women, people of color, and juveniles, The Deviant Prison reverts to...

Author Response

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Association NewsFull Access2020 EduTour to Visit Original ‘Penitentiary’Nick ZagorskiNick ZagorskiSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:18 Feb 2020https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2020.2b10AbstractEastern State Penitentiary, which traces its roots to the prison reform ideas of Benjamin Rush, was an important precursor to the modern penal system.Marked by a red cross, this gate leads to Eastern State Penitentiary’s medical wing. It was recently opened to the public and includes the prison’s psychiatric ward.Nicole FrankhouserWhen the original 13 members of APA met in Philadelphia in 1844 to establish the country’s first medical specialty organization, they toured the recently built Eastern State Penitentiary so they could learn more about the treatment of the “criminally insane.” This year’s EduTour will take participants on a tour of this historic site, which is believed to be the first prison to use approaches aimed at reforming and rehabilitating inmates.The roots of Eastern State Penitentiary can be traced back to an important APA figure: Benjamin Rush. In 1787, Rush founded the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, a group dedicated to improving the appalling conditions of Philadelphia jails. Rush and others believed the key to prisoner reform was to keep individuals in separate cells and provide vocational tasks to keep them busy. Work and solitude would promote “penitence” in this new facility known as a “penitentiary.”Though Rush would not live to see the results, the group he founded eventually convinced the Philadelphia legislature to fund a new facility using the penitentiary model, and Eastern State Penitentiary opened on October 25, 1829. The building itself was considered a marvel in 19th century engineering, and the penitentiary model was subsequently adopted for prisons across the world.As with other noted prisons, Eastern State Penitentiary has seen its share of famous inmates (such as Al Capone), daring escapes, and controversies over prisoner maltreatment before the building closed for good in 1970.EduTour attendees will be able to soak in all the history during a special 90-minute guided tour of the penitentiary. EduTour attendees will also learn more on how psychiatry and the penal system have been intertwined from the time of Benjamin Rush to today, when prisons tragically serve as de facto mental health centers. EduTour guests will also get an interactive tour of the penitentiary’s medical wing and an up-close look at the facility’s laboratories, operating room, and psychiatric ward.Those who are not able to attend the EduTour on Sunday, April 26 (tickets are limited), may still want to stop by this important medical landmark. General guided tours are available every day at 2 p.m., or guests can take a self-guided audio tour narrated by actor Steve Buscemi. ■The visit to Eastern State Penitentiary will be held on Sunday, April 26, from 1:15 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. There is an additional $89 registration fee to participate, and the tour is limited to 45 participants on a first-come, first-served basis. More information can be accessed here. Please email if you have questions. ISSUES NewArchived

Pregnant women and mothers were among the thousands of individuals who were sentenced to at least three years’ penal servitude and admitted to the nineteenth-century Irish female convict prison. While some babies were born behind bars, others were permitted to accompany their convicted mothers into the prison after the penal practice of transportation had ceased. Other dependent children were separated from their convicted mothers for years, cared for by family members or friends, or accommodated in Ireland’s growing web of institutions. Using individual case studies, this article focuses on convict mothers and their young offspring. It draws attention to the increasing restrictions on the admission of infants that were imposed as the nineteenth century progressed, the problems that children of various ages in the penal system seemed to pose for officials, and the difficulties faced by incarcerated mothers who wished to maintain communication with their offspring. This article argues that while there were benefits to parenting within the confines of the prison, sentences of penal servitude had a significant impact on the lives of dependent offspring by dislocating families, separating siblings, or initiating institutional or other care that broke familial bonds permanently. In so doing, the article reveals attitudes towards motherhood as well as female criminality and institutionalization generally during this period and sheds light on an aspect of convict life unique to the women’s prison.

Realignment in California comes at a time when the state’s prison system is expensive and overcrowded; the response has been to reevaluate and reconfigure the way counties use state prisons. Based on an original historical analysis of state archival records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a well as a review of secondary historical accounts of California’s prison system, I show that similar problems and policies were present at the state’s founding: issues of expense, overcrowding, and the county-state relationship help to explain the origins, size, and shape of the California prison system. California’s lack of money first drove it to try to house prisoners on the cheap, starting when it made county jails the state prison system by fiat, continuing through a decade of privatization and convict lease arrangements in San Quentin, and concluding with a state-administered system partly funded by prison labor. By the time the value of prison labor atrophied and the true costs of a nonremunerative prison system revealed itself, the state was locked into fiscal and administrative responsibility for prisoners. Along the way, however, state and local governments sought to pass carceral responsibilities—and their attendant expenses—from one level of government to another in a manner that resembles today’s battles over Realignment.

This article examines a representation of convict leasing in an unexpected and seemingly inconsequential place—an amusement park. Located in Branson, Missouri, the popular 1880s-themed Silver Dollar City proudly claims to offer historical education and entertainment through “realistic” constructions of the past. One of the park’s oldest and most popular attractions is the Flooded Mine ride, where park guests travel in “mine carts” through a depiction of a flooding mine, trying to “help the sheriff” by shooting laser light guns at kitschy animatronic convict laborers who are trying to escape. We first examine the Flooded Mine as a unique form of penal spectatorship, arguing that riders are able to enjoy the lighthearted mockery of the convict laborers’ suffering through a process of moral disengagement. Second, we use the lens of collective memory in an endeavor to expose the processes of remembering and forgetting at work in Silver Dollar City. We argue that the simulations of the past constructed in the park are not an apolitical platform for entertainment, but rather work to produce a narrative that perpetuates a kind of white nostalgia that erases black suffering. While ostensibly displaying a story of convict labor, the Flooded Mine depicts all the prisoners as white men, effectively performing an historical erasure of chattel slavery and its transmutation into convict leasing. By obscuring the incalculable pain produced by convict leasing and incarceration, the dissimulation allows riders to avoid any ethical engagement with these systems of racialized control.

Reviewed by: Capital and Convict: Race, Region, and Punishment in Post–Civil War America by Henry Kamerling Robert Colby Capital and Convict: Race, Region, and Punishment in Post–Civil War America. Henry Kamerling. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. ISBN 978-08139-4055-7. 328 pp., cloth, $45.00. In 1866, South Carolina governor James Orr argued for overhauling the state's penal system. With those held therein "exempt from all labor," he claimed, they remained "vicious, depraved non-producers" (28). While Orr complained specifically about the treatment of freedmen newly under the state's authority, his sentiments encapsulated national theories regarding the intersection of incarceration, work, and character. In Capital and Convict, a comparative study of the penal systems South Carolina and Illinois developed between 1865 and 1886, Henry Kamerling probes the nexus between understandings of convicts' depravity, labor's reformative power, and capitalism's emerging hegemony. Rather than producing fundamentally different punitive regimes (as studies of Gilded Age incarceration often suggest), the North and South saw strikingly similar ones evolve; despite different racial ideologies, capitalism's overarching effects and prisoners' resistance produced penal systems divergent in details but similar in essentials. In the wake of the Civil War, South Carolina and Illinois reckoned with escalating numbers of convicts, which taxed the states' governments and thus their citizenry. Each erected penitentiaries and strove to make the incarcerated offset the expenses they incurred via various forms of contract labor. Beyond seeking to make prisons pay, however, both states responded to a growing impulse to reform inmates. In Illinois, authorities heeded reformers' calls to see their charges as individuals who had deviated from society's norms but were capable of repenting and rejoining that [End Page 197] same society. To speed this process, they advocated religious instruction, education, and a vigorous regimen of refining labor (and if the state profited, all the better). With Radical Reconstruction empowering South Carolina's politically engaged black majority, for a decade that state pursued a similar course and rejected irreconcilable whites' attempts to install a racialized justice system. While the state experimented with convict labor, it rebuffed the practice of leasing convicts to private employers, which all other Southern states deployed. Conceiving of convicts as exiled members of society to be redeemed and reintegrated, South Carolina's and Illinois's prisons largely converged in the decade following the Civil War. When Reconstruction's end evicted black South Carolinians from power, the state immediately aligned punitively with the rest of the South; indeed, one of Governor Wade Hampton's first actions was to legalize convict leasing. From then on, the state increasingly criminalized its black population, rejecting the premise that it could be integrated into civic and political life. South Carolina collectively and publicly punished African Americans, driving them beyond the civic and political pale white Carolinians constructed. While this racialized penal system differed from that in Illinois (which continued pursuing rehabilitative measures), Kamerling suggests that the similarities remained yet more salient thanks to Gilded Age capitalism's demands. Illinois's system sought to bend prisoners to the structures of industrial life—to remove recalcitrance, install bourgeois morality, and develop the labor discipline necessary for life as wage-workers. South Carolina's efforts similarly conformed convicts to the state's particular expression of capitalism, which prized cheap, submissive black labor above all else. South Carolina's and Illinois's penal systems converged yet further through their failures. Those incarcerated in each state vigorously resisted being molded to fit capitalism's requirements. They saw themselves not as deviants but as victims of systemic injustices. Secure in their innocence, they fought against having their minds, souls, and bodies bent to the nascent economic order. In the face of continuous, stubborn resistance, guards and wardens disregarded high-minded reforms for force. Brutality and repression instigated cycles of resistance and violence. Contestation, then, made the lived realities of both penal systems fundamentally similar; incarceration could well be worse in an Illinois penitentiary than in a South Carolina convict camp, with differences stemming less from region than the whims of penal authorities. Kamerling deftly deploys the relatively limited available sources to indicate similarities in carceral life across the late-nineteenth-century...

The convict lease system, whereby prisoners' labor is exploited for private organizations' gain, has been in existence for more than 200 years within the United States, and American political and economic interests have created a symbiotic relationship between private industry and prison labor. Historically, the convict labor system has undergone various transitional stages between the early modern era (1790–1970s) and the postmodern era. The convict lease system can be viewed as an arrangement between politicians and entrepreneurs that has creatively expanded patterns of degradation with the intent and purpose of manipulating social control strategies for economic purposes.

During the aftermath of the Civil War, prison systems in southern states were plagued by deteriorating prisons, an increase in inmates, and a lack of funding to support rebuilding and maintaining an effective prison system. Southern states, as a result, began experimenting with leasing inmates to businesses and individuals as a means of reducing prison populations and costs. The convict leasing system, however, was plagued with abuse and mistreatment of inmates causing its popularity to decline in spite of profits and by the 1930s convict leasing ceased to be used in the United States.