Robert Chase's compelling book We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America made me think about the seemingly unlikely pairing of Isabel De Olvera and the incarcerated Texans with whom the book focuses. As a scholar of Black women's history, I made connections between this seventeenth-century woman of African descent and twentieth-century prisoners because they both used the law to fight against those who sought to enslave them.In 1600, Olvera, a woman of African and Indian heritage, sought protection from the mayor of Querétaro, Mexico, through a petition that would validate her rights as a free woman to join an expedition as a servant, not slave, of a Spanish woman. She knew enough about the power of New World slavery and the legal system to have a petition drawn that she hoped would serve as a defense against those who might see her race and gender as compatible with bondage. It is not clear if Olvera received the protection that she sought, but she certainly believed her rights should be safeguarded. In fact, the last words of her petition forcefully state, “I demand justice.”1Thanks to Robert Chase's meticulous research and well-written narrative of the prisoners’ rights movement, we know a lot more about how incarcerated men and women in twentieth-century Texas argued that the coerced labor and prison abuse they experienced was in fact modern-day slavery. We Are Not Slaves addresses in frightening detail the courage, trauma, and perseverance of prisoners who did not see their gender, ethnicity, race, or incarcerated status as compatible with the prison regime exploitation that they compared to antebellum slavery. We Are Not Slaves, as a result, shows how Texas prisoners used the law to demand justice by examining how they became politicized in response to prison conditions and the process by which they sought to reform the myriad abuses in the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC).Indeed, both Olvera and the Texas prisoners demanded justice when they employed the law to improve and provide protections for their lives.Most Americans would probably agree about the significance of the abolitionist movement that ultimately led to the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, but might pause when asked to think about prisoners’ civil rights. Indeed, they, including some academics, might have a more difficult time supporting the twentieth-century prisoners’ rights movement, which argued for citizenship rights and the humane treatment of incarcerated individuals. Instead, they might question the legitimacy of lawbreakers using the legal system to improve prison-living conditions. They might also ask, “Why should anyone care about this issue?” Robert Chase provides a trenchant and in-depth accounting of why the prisoners’ rights movement in postwar Texas matters.We Are Not Slaves reframes our understanding of the Ruiz v. Estelle case by focusing on the centrality of prisoner-initiated civil rights complaints and social protest. The 1980 civil rights lawsuit ruled that the conditions of imprisonment within the TDC prison system violated the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution (“cruel and unusual punishment”). Influenced and emboldened by the civil rights, Chicano, and Black Power movements, Texas prisoners disrupted the TDC's powerful public image of efficiency and order by exposing the impact of coerced labor and brutal violence that, they argued, replicated slavery. The long-standing practice, in existence as late as 1978, of using only African American men who served longer sentences as “houseboys” or live-in domestic servants (89) in the homes of “top administrators and wardens” (91) served as but one example of how the TDC's unofficial practices appeared to represent the servitude long associated with southern enslavement. While TDC officials touted the dignity and necessity of work to fill idle minds (60), prisoners documented experiences of “slave labor” where they toiled in the fields “ten hours a day, six days a week” (73) without renumeration while creating one of the “state's biggest agribusinesses” (67) and subsequent lucrative success in industrial production. Consider, for instance, how, in 1970, the “Texas prison industries put 1,300 men to work and grossed $2 million a year” when, in 1972, “the cost per prisoner remained one of the nation's lowest, at $3 per prisoner per day” (97).The TDC maintained its harsh labor regime and production quotas by using varied types of carceral violence including corporal punishment such as having guards use their horses to “stomp over indolent or exhausted prisoners who tarried” in the fields (79). Sustained and effective violence, however, stemmed from those prisoners chosen by TDC administrators to be building tenders (BT), or those selected who were given unfettered power—where they engaged in “routine but unreported beatings and maimings of fellow prisoners”—to maintain law and order over the general prison population (108). Prisoner David Ruiz's 1978 complaint letter to TDC director W. J. Estelle highlighted not simply BTs ability to orchestrate vicious prison rapes and inflict abuse as sexual predators themselves but the key role BTs played in an internal economy where prisoners—who were deemed younger, weaker, and/or agitators—could be claimed as sexual property and trafficked to different inmates (See Chapter 3, especially 102–3). Chase contends that the BT system shaped a structure of carceral violence where men could experience a type of “double enslavement—a slave for the state in prison fields and an enslaved body and servant within prison cells” (105). Ruiz's 1978 letter, however, exemplifies his perseverance in fighting against carceral abuse, as he wrote about these grievances six years after his 1972 “twelve-page, handwritten complaint” became the impetus for the Ruiz v. Estelle lawsuit, which Chase argues “started a mass movement within the prison that initiated a new phase for prisoners’ rights in Texas” (274). Ruiz's actions, like those of so many others, reflected the difficult work of ongoing protest.We Are Not Slaves illustrates growing prisoner resistance to the TDC's “prison plantation” in a number of ways but emphasizes their use of the legal system and especially those activists known as writ writers who taught themselves the law and shaped the direction of the prisoners’ rights movement. Prisoners responded to the draconian labor practices by singing work songs, with work strikes, and with self-mutilation. For instance, in 1977, a white prisoner explained in a letter to a legislator that he used an “old razor blade” in his cell to sever “the main tendon” in his “left leg” so that he “would not have to continue working in the fields” or suffer the abuses of field work (88). Other prisoners like Ruiz sought to work on appeals to their convictions and subsequently used what they learned to fight against carceral abuse and violence via the legal system. Fred Cruz represents how a prisoner could become politicized and influence fellow inmates. For TDC officials, Cruz's attempt to learn the law meant that he was a threat and an agitator. In fact, as more prisoners became jailhouse lawyers, the TDC restricted their use of “legal material,” which explains why, in 1966, Cruz was placed in solitary confinement when a copy of the U.S. Constitution was discovered in his cell (160). Fellow prisoner Floyd Patterson recalled how Cruz's intelligence and exemplary writ writing inspired others to action: “He was smarter than the law. . . . He knew when the officials in the prison system was breaking the law. He knew their law, . . . he knew their American Constitution, he was just a lawyer. And he was a threat” (214). Cruz seemed willing to help and work with others; moreover, the prison movement he helped build garnered notice from those social justice advocates outside the prison who kept prisoners’ grievances in the courts. Over the course of a protracted struggle, male prisoners and their allies convinced the federal government that the TDC violated prisoners’ civil rights.Chase discusses the challenges prisoners faced in Goree Prison, the TDC's only women's facility, but the book never quite tackles how incarcerated women as a group participated in and benefited from the male-dominated prisoners’ rights movement. With the vast number of differences between the men's prisons and Goree, which on the surface suggests that women were treated better, what did cruel and unusual punishment mean for women prisoners? Scholars such as Beth E. Richie, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kali N. Gross2 have documented the incessant violence that Black women, Goree's largest incarcerated population group, faced in the carceral system, but Chase suggests that the punishments women prisoners encountered at Goree were less violent (321–22). Yet, one might consider the common practice of having “other prisoners as medical staff performing intimate pelvic exams” a deep violation that became a part of several women's grievances against the TDC (321). In addition to other social justice movements, how did the women's movement and feminism, as Emily L. Thuma3 has shown elsewhere, help politicize Goree? Did the very public cases of North Carolina's Joan Little and the “Free Angela” movement for California's political prisoner Angela Davis encourage not only Black women but Mexican American women prisoners—who Chase notes experienced discrimination and mistreatment because of their smaller numbers and language barriers—to think about improving their own living conditions (151–52)? How did women resist carceral violence and exploitation? Chase's focus on Martha Quinlan's story, as a successful writ writer who had “three litigation suits pending against the TDC” (321) and who testified in the Ruiz case, is quite important but is one story among many uncovered narratives. I acknowledge that some of these questions fall outside of We Are Not Slaves’ framework as Chase is quite explicit that he is studying “prison masculinity” (22), yet I hope that someone is working on excavating the twentieth-century lives of incarcerated southern women and their activism in the same way that Chase has done for male prisoners.In conclusion, We Are Not Slaves excavates the harsh terrain of state-sponsored human abuse and control that depended on coerced and unpaid labor. Chase illuminates the connections between how movements for social justice outside the prison emboldened activism among the incarcerated men and women within the TDC. Most importantly, We Are Not Slaves encourages readers to expand their imaginings of struggles for justice and resistance against oppression by taking more seriously the perspective of the prisoners’ rights movement.The 2020 COVID-19 crisis illuminates how Americans continued to grapple with the legacy of how to treat incarcerated individuals humanely, as examples from Virginia, California, and Texas expose the unresolved questions about prisoners’ rights. In Virginia, protests outside the Richmond City Justice Center led to the arrests of eleven activists after they demanded that prison officials provide appropriate health care as well as personal protective equipment to the imprisoned after “more than 100 inmates and staff” tested positive or were exposed to someone who tested positive during an August outbreak.4 In September, as California dealt with the pandemic and deadly wildfires, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that would provide an opportunity for incarcerated firefighters, many of whom are paid $1 an hour, to seek employment as professional firefighters once they have served their time.5 During the pandemic, these firefighters risked their lives in multiple ways to provide a public service that seeks to save people and property, prompting many to ask difficult but important questions such as whether this is slave labor or whether these firefighters should be considered essential workers.6 Finally, in the twenty-first century, Texas's handling of incarcerated individuals during the pandemic mimics the neglect that Chase documents in the last century. In September, a report revealed that the state “has had more inmate deaths related to the coronavirus than any other prison system in the nation. Its death toll of at least 162 inmates outranks every other state as well as the federal prison system.”7 Prisoners, however, still demanded humane treatment. In March, elderly prisoners sued the Department of Criminal Justice for violating the Eighth Amendment and their disability rights. On September 29, 2020, after finding that prisoners’ rights were violated, a federal judge “ordered the Texas prison system . . . to provide more protective measures against coronavirus” because they had “acted with deliberate indifference toward inmates’ medical needs and recklessly disregarded obvious health risks during the pandemic.”8 After reading We Are Not Slaves, the TDC's neglect and prisoner demands for justice during a pandemic should not be a surprise. Indeed, Robert Chase's work makes a convincing case that we should all take a second look at carceral state history, as well as the present-day living conditions of the incarcerated.