We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America by Robert T. Chase

Abstract

Reviewed by: We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America by Robert T. Chase Paul M. Lucko We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners' Rights in Postwar America. By Robert T. Chase. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 544. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) A rich body of scholarship has emerged in recent years that examines the historical roots of mass incarceration in this country. Robert Chase's We Are Not Slaves joins Robert Perkinson's Texas Tough (Metropolitan, 2010) and Ethan Blue's Doing Time in the Depression (New York University Press, 2012) as the latest in a genre of critical works that focus on Texas prisons that evolved from post-bellum slave plantations to modern military style disciplinary units. Different from other Texas prison studies, We Are Not Slaves considers the issue of sexuality within a total institution. Partly as a result of widespread negative publicity surrounding homosexual "perversion" (49) among state prisoners during the 1940s, the institution's governing board [End Page 240] hired a new director, O. B. Ellis, who, with increased legislative appropriations, constructed cells in place of crude dormitories, or "tanks," on the vast prison agricultural lands. Ellis also embarked upon an ambitious reform program that transformed the long-neglected penal plantations into one of the state's premier agribusiness entities. Ellis and his successor, George Beto, proved especially adept at promoting Texas prisons as symbols of a modern South. Ironically, however, instead of preventing homosexual behavior, the cell blocks increasingly fell under the control of primarily White trusty prisoners, known as "building tenders," who were permitted to supervise and physically punish other prisoners and engage in a "sex trade [that] provided building tenders the unofficial . . . power to rape other prisoners and buy and sell other prisoners' bodies" (125) through human trafficking. Much of the prisoners' rights litigation that culminated in the Ruiz v. Estelle case, which declared that the Texas prison system violated inmates' constitutional rights, sought to curb the power of the male building tenders and a lesser number of female key girls and row tenders. While other studies have attributed the success of Ruiz anda national prisoners' rights movement to the willingness of federal judges to abandon a long-standing "hands-off" approach to such lawsuits, Chase places the prisoners, who courageously challenged brutal and vindictive administrators, at the forefront of the prison reform movement. Inspired by nationwide social movements both inside and outside of prison walls beginning in the 1960s, ethnically diverse coalitions persisted until Federal Judge William Wayne Justice ruled in 1980 that the total conditions of confinement in Texas correctional facilities constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Although We Are Not Slaves devotes considerable space to David Ruiz and Fred Cruz, Chase also elevates lesser known prisoners, such as Martha Quinlan, Allen Lamar, Johnny Swift, Salvador Gonzales, Frank Leahy, Eddie Ward, Lee Otis John-son, Ray Hill, Al Slaton, and Lawrence Pope, to a heroic status for their contributions to the movement that toppled the system of "modern day slavery" (299). The book includes copious endnotes and a deep bibliography containing an extensive list of interviews that Chase and other researchers conducted with participants in the Texas prisoners' movement. While the author's title and principle thesis accentuate "plantation slavery discourse" (327), he does not directly confront the Thirteenth Amendment's paradoxical clause that permits slavery as punishment for crime. Acknowledging that Judge Justice "did not take up the language of the prisoners' slave discourse and never once referred to Texas prisoners as slaves nor the prison system as a plantation" (328), Chase concludes that the prisoners' movement ended penal slavery but failed to avert "a massive [End Page 241] prison building program that advanced Texas as the nation's largest carceral state" (12). All in all, this is an outstanding work that will provoke discussion and undoubtedly inspire other studies as this country seeks solutions to problems that stem from the nation's experience with incarceration. [End Page 242] Paul M. Lucko Murray State University Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association