In We Are Not Slaves, historian Robert Chase brings to life the prisoners’ rights movement in the Texas Department of Correction (TDC) from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Between the late 1940s and the 1960s, Texas's prison system transformed from one of the worst in the South to one of most efficient, cost-effective, and self-sufficient in the nation. This “modernization narrative” concealed the primacy of the “inmate trusty” system undergirding the TDC's lauded modernization. Endowed by TDC administrators to control and discipline inmates, armed trusties, known as building tenders, were in charge of the prison cells and operated an internal economy, selling and buying not only food and cigarettes but also sex and bodies. The TDC prisoners’ rights movement exposed the range of the brutalities in Texas's prison system, especially its reliance on the trusty system. The movement took multiple forms, but perhaps the most essential approach was its civil rights litigation campaign led by writ writers and supported by external allies that resulted in the Ruiz v. Estelle lawsuit in 1972, which, by the early 1980s, brought down the trusty system.Chase has written a complex story, expertly told from a prodigious body of sources, including private papers, government documents and reports, oral histories, and newspapers. We Are Not Slaves is a work of comparative history and arguably an example of state racial capitalism, though this lens is not explicitly engaged in the book. It does engage the subfields of civil rights, Black Power, labor, gender, and sexuality history. As an interracial movement history, We Are Not Slaves expands the periodization of the civil rights movement beyond the mid-1970s, and, as scholarship on prisoners’ rights, We Are Not Slaves effectively demonstrates the salience of the southern story to the larger national narrative on prisons, prisoner resistance, and mass incarceration.While reading We Are Not Slaves, I grappled with Chase's and the historical actors’ use of “slavery” to explain their own status within the TDC. While at no point does Chase argue that the conditions prisoners experienced in the TDC were the same as those of slaves in colonial and antebellum America, I wondered how we might appreciate how and why prisoners self-identified as “slaves,” without falling into a debate, though important, about the Thirteenth Amendment but instead foregrounding the geographical, spatial, and temporal dynamics of the historical process they called “slavery.” We know, as the late historian Ira Berlin explained in his classic Many Thousands Gone (1998) that there were “societies with slaves” and “slave societies.”What does this all have to do with Chase's We Are Not Slaves and the prison system in Texas? As Berlin wrote, “[T]ime and space are the usual boundaries of historical inquiry.”1 While Berlin was explaining the different formations of three distinct slave societies in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I want to consider his framework to think about how distinct “slave societies” or perhaps “unfree societies” and different temporalities can overlap not only because of the traces of US chattel slavery in the present but also how memory—real or inherited— shapes how we understand and make sense of time. It also helps us consider how these temporalities and spatial terrains help make sense of the limits of freedom. In We Are Not Slaves, Chase deftly provides a model to understanding some of the varieties of experiences of those “made to wear unfreedom” without conflating the different kind of slavery operating in TDC with US antebellum slavery.2 Chase offers us a way to see continuity without sameness. I think the prisoners’ references to “slavery” helped them understand both the nature of their unfreedom as well as how their condition constituted a slavery of a different kind. Taking the lead from the prisoners and their rights movement, Chase situates this story within the past of “slavery.” At the same time, he takes seriously the time and space of the TDC, the trusty system, and building tenders’ internal economy to explicate why prisoners self-identified as slaves. Slavery is employed here by Chase and the prisoners’ movement both as a historical referent and personal to their experience, yet still differentiating the latter from the former. The point here is to consider not only how “slavery” is used in We Are Not Slaves as two distinct spatial and temporal frames but also how they overlap. We Are Not Slaves articulates “slavery” and “slaves” generally in two overlapping ways: prisoners making their own experiences legible by referencing chattel slavery and Chase's own historical narrative as a rendering of the historical process. As a historian, he excavates the multiple modalities of the inmate trusty system, particularly the centrality of its most repressive mode—prison rape—as the fulcrum of prison slavery. From my own position as a reader, the TDC was certainly a “slave society,” yet, within the larger southern society, it was a “society with slaves.”In We Are Not Slaves, these ways of knowing the temporal and processual dimensions of “slavery” often occupies the same space. One example of the powerful ways that Chase illuminates “slavery” as liminal space between the slave trade and prison slavery in the TDC is in his analysis of the process of geographic and temporal disorientation. Here, temporal disorientation describes prisoners’ sensorial confusion as they confront an othering experience that hearkens back to an unknowable, but somehow familiar, time. Benny Wade Clewis, an African American prisoner incarcerated in 1955, described his initial journey to the TDC on a bus, as going back in time, akin to time travel. As Clewis remembered, They had a long chain they would take and put, like you see back in slavery days, when they had those chains around they neck with the big hook. . . . And they would run these chains through there and run 40 or 50 inmates, run them through all they necks. Then, they would handcuff you here and have chains here with a big ring through it. . . Then, they'd bring another chain from that second loop there and hook it through your waist and hook it to that wall. Then, they would bring another chain and hook it down on the floor and put it around your legs through another ring. And that's where you'd stay (105).The ride alone is disorienting. As Chase notes, during the postwar era, the TDC's population had changed from predominately rural to urban, reflecting the increase of African Americans and Mexican Americans in urban areas (74); concomitantly, it was also disorientating yet figurative, “like [travelling] back in slavery days,” because of their encounter with this rural landscape on which they would toil on prison plantations; the accoutrement of captivity, the experience of being shackled to the wall, the ground, and other prisoners, reinforced this sensorial confusion.Despite their references to slavery, prisoners described their own authentic experiences in a distinctive system of bondage. As We Are Not Slaves demonstrates, the shift from dormitories to cells created new spatial and hierarchical arrangements that fortified the power and control of prisoner trusties. As Chase explains, “[T]he buying and selling of Texas prisoners constituted an internal sex trade where hypermasculine predators were given state sanction to deny men control over their bodies through vicious rape that rendered young men as ‘property,’ ‘wives,’ as ‘slaves’” (104). Of course, as Chase demonstrates, the TDC was built on a foundation of white supremacy. All the TDC's guards were white, and only whites served as the “head building tender” of a prison. Furthermore, excepting for the white building tenders, building tenders only disciplined and controlled members of their own racial or ethnic group. Nonetheless, prisoners of color also viewed whites as slaves. Accordingly, explained a prisoner named Clewis, “[T]hose slave drivers [prison administrators] . . . didn't treat the white no better than he treated the black, you know. You was a convict, you know, and that's what you were to him, whatever color you were. And, as far as having a chain that run black inmates to the penitentiary, one that runs whites to the penitentiary, and one that run Mexicans, we was all the same when it came to that” (105–6).These shared experiences and the prison system's carceral geography were not only conductive to consciousness raising but also to creating a groundswell of interracial organization and political mobilization (299). The prominence of the civil rights litigation campaigns and the various Black, Chicano, and sympathetic white prisoner political formations that self-identified as slaves—exemplified by the “Eight Hoe,” the coalition of writ writers; and the “peaceful riot,” the work strike of 1978, involving six of the prisons’ fifteen units and approximately 15 percent of the 29,000-person prison population—are illustrative of this (308).In closing, Chase's We Are Not Slaves tells a multifaceted story of resilience, the ugliness of prison, prisoners, and prison administrators, shedding light on the often untold—or at the very least unacknowledged—resilience of bondage in the postslavery and even post–civil rights eras. At the same time, We Are Not Slaves is also a story of the boundless capacity and resilience of humans—even the alleged undeserved. The TDC prisoners’ rights movement is a template for all seeking “freedom.” Using political protest, labor strikes, testimonies, and legal writing, they bore witness to their own humanity and collectively, if only briefly, exposed the the TDC's oppressive and exploitative trusty system.