White Prisoners Research Articles

The Carceral Universal and the Prison Particular

The Carceral Universal and the Prison Particular

Toward a History of Sexual Violence behind Bars

Toward a History of Sexual Violence behind Bars

Author Response

Author Response

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Beyond the Metaphor of Slavery

Beyond the Metaphor of Slavery

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF RACIAL SEGREGATION IN ERNEST JAMES GAINES’S A LESSON BEFORE DYING

In Ernest James Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, racial segregation between Blacks and Whites in the United States is more evident in the field of education and in prisons where schools, libraries, and jail cells are segregated because of white Americans’ opposition to their black peers’ conception of racial mixing extolled by Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, to quote only two. This racial segregation shows not only the inferior position occupied by Blacks before their white fellows, but also the kind of lifestyle they have to live daily on the American soil. For, the novel reads that while white schools are well built and crammed with good pedagogical materials and teachers who teach all along the school period, black ones are, however, unfashionable with teachers deprived of good teaching materials and whose teaching period is very often shortened for the simple reason that their learners have to go and work for Whites’ interests on plantations. In prisons, for example, while white prisoners are fed daily and put into jail cells with seats and toilet papers, black prisoners find theirs deprived of these important artifacts.

Black Women's Domestic Labor at Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary) during Jim Crow

On September 19, 1922, Beulah M., a thirty-year-old cook, saved a “small child from a vicious cow on Angola.” This event occurred only a few months after her admission to the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP), where she was serving a life sentence for alleged murder. The infant was one of the many of the white prison staff's children raised on the penitentiary plantation nestled in a large meander of the Mississippi river. This happy-ending drama featuring a Black woman prisoner and a free white child arose from the “cohabitation” of free white households within the incarcerated population. The incident, quite unexpected in a carceral setting, prompted the penitentiary general manager to place Beulah M. on the “eligibility list” for parole and to grant her “full single good time for meritorious service,” which meant the possibility of an earlier release by a few months. Beulah's action might also have motivated authorities to assign her to be “servant” in the Camp D Captain's house in July 1923, and later to be a nurse in the nine-bedroom “Big House,” occupied by one of the penitentiary staff of higher rank. The peculiar nature of her alleged crime, the beating to death of her seven-year-old Black step-daughter, was apparently not perceived as a deterrent to entrust her to care for white children. Her courageous action toward a white child at Angola might even have been a compelling argument for her early pardon and discharge, which she received only after nine years at Angola, although her plea for a pardon had been rejected at least once before. Beulah M.'s story is the story of a coerced African American domestic laborer in white homes, rewarded for her perceived subservience to the Jim Crow order. It exemplifies one aspect of Black women's experiences of hard labor for the state of Louisiana during the first half of the twentieth century.

Race matters: cardiovascular disease risk in male US prisoners

Abstract Funding Acknowledgements Type of funding sources: Public grant(s) – National budget only. Main funding source(s): NIH/National Institute of Nursing Research, 1RC2NR011948 Introduction Approximately 10% of the 2.2 million prisoners in the US have a diagnosis of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and in 2016, 28% of all deaths in custody were attributable to CVD. Black race, inadequate health literacy, and poor perceived control are predictors of increased cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, which are prevalent in prisoners. However, little is known about the relationships among race, health literacy, and perceived control in CVD risk for male prisoners. Objective The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships among race, health literacy, perceived control, and CVD risk while controlling for well-known risk factors (education, partner status, and body mass index) in male prisoners. Methods We used baseline data from 349 male prisoners in a biobehavioral CVD risk reduction intervention. Health literacy was measured using the Newest Vital Sign and perceived control by the Control Attitudes Scale- Revised. CVD risk was quantified with the Framingham Risk Score (FRS). Three indirect effects of race on CVD risk were examined using serial mediation model with two sequential mediators (i.e., health literacy and perceived control) and 95% confidence intervals from 5000 bootstrap samples. Results Of the participants (mean age = 36 + 10 years), 64.2% were white and 35.8% were black. Mean education level was 12 years and most (85.8%) were not married or partnered. Mean BMI was 28.3 + 5.0. Mean FRS was 6.63 + 4.90, indicating risk percentages of 2.3 to 13.3% over the next ten years. Black prisoners were younger (35 + 9 versus 37 + 10, p = .047) and had lower levels of health literacy (3.84 + 1.90 versus 4.69 + 1.63, p < .001) than white prisoners. No statistically significant differences in perceived control, education, partner status, or body mass index were noted between races. All three indirect effects of race on CVD were significant while the direct effect of race was not. Compared to white prisoners, black prisoners had higher levels of CVD risk through health literacy (a1b1 = .3571, 95% CI [.0948, .7162]) and lower levels of CVD risk through perceived control (a2b2 = -.1855, 95% CI [-.4388, -.0077]). Black prisoners had higher levels of CVD risk through health literacy influenced by perceived control (a1b2d21 = .0627, 95% CI [.0028, .1409]) indicating that despite the protective effect of higher levels of perceived control in black prisoners, CVD risk remained higher compared to their white counterparts. Conclusion Future CVD risk reduction interventions in prisoners of all races, but specifically black male prisoners, should include goals of improving health literacy and perceived control in addition to the traditional modifiable risk factors often included in biobehavioral interventions.

The Monochrome Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (1967)

The Monochrome Chain Gang and Cool Hand Luke (1967) James Emmett Ryan Historically speaking, the chain gang has been largely an instrument with which to terrorize, torture, and exploit Negroes. It was adopted on a grand scale at the end of the Civil War and was one of the devices consciously developed by the former slaveholders to put the newly “freed” Negroes back into bondage. —Walter Wilson (1933)1 According to the Pensacola Journal, on July 17, 1967, a flash fire the previous night had killed 37 of the 51 chain-gang men incarcerated at the rural stockade in Berrydale, an hour north of Pensacola, Florida. The prison had been home to all-black inmates until two weeks before the fire, when the state brought in 15 white prisoners.2 According to the guard on duty (an account that was later angrily challenged by inmate family members), prisoners rioted, and both black and white inmates independently set fire to the bunkhouse, purportedly to force the transfer of certain men. Leg irons, disciplinary flogging, and sweat boxes for Florida prisoners—common punishments into the 1920s—had been mostly eliminated, but conditions were still severe, and a solitary armed guard controlled all inmates from behind a locked chain-link fence.3 Inmates needed his permission to make any movements. On July 17, the guard was either unable or unwilling to unlock the wooden bunkhouse, which was rapidly consumed with flame. Some newspaper accounts commended the guard on duty, who had a hand in rescuing a few of the prisoners while receiving a minor burn. Left out of newspaper accounts was his decision, upon hearing the stockade disturbance and apparently fearing the release of the prisoners, to delay rescue by throwing his keys over a fence to another guard, with instructions to bring additional weapons and more guards to the burning barracks. By 1967, American movie audiences had been hearing regularly about penitentiary life for more than 30 years. The prison-genre film was brought into prominence by the actor [End Page 44] Robert Montgomery in The Big House (1930), a successful Hollywood release in which a stylish but dissolute young man is sentenced to 10 years in a squalid penitentiary for a drunk-driving homicide. As the legal scholar Mel Gutterman has observed, the box-office success of The Big House paved the way for high-profile actors in subsequent decades to try their hand at prison movies, including Paul Muni in the screen version of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).4 Serious dramatic prison movies would remain a staple Hollywood product throughout the 20th century, as evidenced by Spencer Tracy’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and Burt Lancaster’s two popular films based on penitentiary inmates, Brute Force (1947) and the Oscar-nominated Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). Following the success of these early examples of the prison-exposé genre, a subsequent generation of important actors stepped in, including Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in the Papillon (1973), Clint Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz (1979), Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman in Brubaker (1980), and Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman in the critically acclaimed Shawshank Redemption (1994).5 The success of such American films was perhaps unsurprising for, as Michel Foucault has shown, actual European chain-gangs had, for centuries before the cinema age, served as living entertainment, subject to print and image representation and theater adaptations, skillful or otherwise, as ordinary communities became audiences for troupes of itinerant, laboring criminals.6 Audiences remained keen to learn about the prison demimonde and its shadow portrait of American society. Low-budget exploitation films, such as Chain Gang (1952) and Girl on a Chain Gang (1966), set in male and female American prisons and highlighting the purported and actual rampant sexuality and violence endemic to these institutions, also proliferated throughout the twentieth century and became widely popular beginning in the 1930s. [End Page 45] So it was that holiday-season audiences in 1967 watched actor Strother Martin deliver one of the most memorable lines in twentieth-century American film: “What we have here is failure to communicate”—a statement delivered without a trace of emotion by “Captain...

Early release from prison in time of COVID-19: Determinants of unfavourable decisions towards Black prisoners.

On the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overcrowding in prisons led to efforts to decarcerate in order to prevent and control outbreaks in prisons. This study analyses how public support for such exceptional measures are determined by cognitive and ideological factors known to create and maintain racial biases in the criminal system. Participants were asked to express their level of agreement with the early-release of hypothetical prisoners. Results showed participants to be less favourable to the early-release of Black compared to White prisoners, when they had committed a stereotypically Black crime. As expected, the congruency between the crime stereotypicality and the colour of the prisoner’s skin did not emerge for White prisoners. Moreover, the difference between the agreement with the release of the Black vs. the White prisoner when both committed a stereotypically Black crime was higher as the level of endorsement of Meritocracy increased. Contrastingly, Anti-egalitarianism only predicted an overall disagreement with prisoners’ early-release. This paper highlights the cumulative explanation by different levels of analysis of this current problem and implications for the development of the public opinion on penal subjects.

With Age Comes Respect? And for Whom Exactly? A Quantitative Examination of White and BAME Prisoner Experiences of Respect Elicited through HM Inspectorate of Prisons Survey Responses

AbstractThrough the analysis of survey data, collected by HM Inspectorate of Prisons between 2010 and 2019, we examine the responses of adult male prisoners of different ages and ethnicities and the extent to which they report being treated with respect by staff. Survey responses from 62,664 prisoners support the conclusion that Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) prisoners are less likely than white prisoners to report that they are treated with respect; younger prisoners are less likely than older prisoners to do so. Our macro‐level findings demonstrate that there is considerable variation between the subgroups within these broad categories and that a simplification of experiences may lead to incorrect assumptions about the experiences of minority groups in prison. These survey data should be used in conjunction with other resources, such as official data and operational statistics, to support detailed examination of prisoner treatment and conditions for safe, decent and rehabilitative prisons.

Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. Michael P. Gray

Reviewed by: Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. Michael P. Gray Brian D. McKnight (bio) Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered. Edited by Michael P. Gray. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2018. Pp. 232. Cloth, $45.00.) Over the course of the past two decades, Michael Gray has established himself as a leading scholar of the Civil War prison experience. His first book, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (2001), broke new ground, and this current offering does the same. Often anthologies fail to live up to their potential because of the inability of their essays to bring cohesion to the topic or the failure of the essays to capitalize on the power of scholarly innovation. This book avoids both of these issues [End Page 127] and effectively brings the study of Civil War prisons into the twenty-first century. Gray, a professor of history at East Stroudsburg University, has gathered an exceptional collection of scholars offering new and interesting treatments of the Civil War captivity experience. In his introduction, Gray does an excellent job of taking the reader through the historiography of Civil War prison and prisoner studies. His examination of the major figures and works is bolstered by his solid appreciation for the impact of our contemporary concerns on the writing of history. In this case, he uses the centennial celebration in 1961 as a touchstone in the development of a mature study of Civil War prisons and shows how that development has continued up to the present day. Scholars lamenting our field's loss of focus on historiography will be pleased with the quality and content of Gray's introduction. Divided into three sections, the book does less studying the prisons and prisoners and more deconstructing the integral elements of captivity. Evan Kutzler's essay on the environmental aspects of captivity reminds readers that the common louse could wreak havoc on the morale of prisoners. Kutzler uses the louse to call for a greater focus on environmental concerns during the Civil War by reminding readers that "how prisoners gave meaning to the sounds of birds or the feeling of lice says much about both the experiences of captivity as well as the imaginations, presumptions, and standards they brought with them into war and captivity" (17–18). Gray's offering examines the tourism industry that popped up around prison camps and brought citizens to the stockades to view the captured enemy. He concludes that despite the Union army's proud adoption of Francis Lieber's code, it clearly looked the other way when it came to violating General Orders No. 100, section III, articles 56 and 75, which explicitly protect prisoners from "intentional suffering or disgrace" and any intentional "indignity" (43). Angela Zombek explores the importance of religion to the prisoners through her examination of the wartime activism of Catholic priests. Although these three essays do not hold together as well as essays in subsequent sections, they are excellent, innovative treatments. The second section focuses on the suffering of prisoners and opens with Lorien Foote's discussion of retaliation against prisoners of war. From using prisoners as human shields to the Confederacy's permitting state courts to charge and prosecute Federal prisoners during wartime, the Confederacy walked a dangerous line in regard to the rules of warfare. Christopher Barr's essay examines race and slavery within the prison environment and finds the power that race had over captivity, with a healthy [End Page 128] dose of historical memory. Tellingly, Barr writes, "If the politics of slavery and emancipation could affect how white prisoners understood their captivity, it defined how black prisoners experienced it" (117). Kelly Mezurek treats the ironic phenomenon of Confederate prisoners being held by black Union guards. For the Union army, using African American prison guards permitted black participation, but in a more menial role than that of front-line soldier. It gave the army a place to assign black troops outside the limelight of combat operations and had the added psychological benefit of turning the racial tables on white southerners fighting for the cause of racial superiority. Perhaps the most innovative section of the book is its...

A Disgrace to the Master Race: Colonial Discourse Surrounding the Incarceration of "European" Prisoners within the Colony of Natal towards the End of the Nineteenth and Beginning of the Twentieth Centuries

The discourse surrounding the punishment of offenders within a society reveals much about the particular ideological underpinnings of power within that society. Penal discourse within colonial societies is particularly interesting, in that it traces the specific contours of the racist ideologies which characterise those societies. This article is focused upon penal discourse within the Colony of Natal towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Within the colony at this time, the race of an offender was becoming increasingly important in determining the type of punishment, treatment and training considered appropriate for that offender. This article is focused - in particular - upon the discourse surrounding the punishment of ‘European’ offenders in colonial Natal. It is submitted that the punishment of these offenders raised all sorts of ideological problems for the colonists, since the offenders in question were members of the white 'master race'. The following central themes within the colonial penal discourse of the time are discussed: first, the role that 'shame' and 'degradation' were considered to play in the punishment of white - but not black - prisoners; second, the perceived need to train white - but not black - prisoners in skilled work, to enable white prisoners to find employment upon leaving prison; and, third, the perceived need to keep white - but not black - prisoners out of the public gaze, in particular avoiding situations in which white prisoners could be seen being punished alongside black prisoners and subject to the control of black prison guards. Examining the precise contours of the penal ideology which underpinned the punishment of offenders in colonial Natal, may be useful in understanding certain of the foundations of racist penal thinking during subsequent periods of South African history, including the notorious apartheid era.
 

Spearman's hypothesis not supported? Three meta-analyses of Black and White prisoners, Northeast Asians, and Arabs and Jews

Spearman's hypothesis states that differences between groups on the subtests of an IQ battery are a function of the g loadings of these subtests, and it is virtually always supported. There are anomalies: comparisons for which Spearman's hypothesis shows no supporting evidence. What they all have in common is an unusual Verbal/Performance profile. We carried out meta-analyses for these comparisons: Black and White prisoners, Asians and Whites, and Arabs and Jews in Israel. We carried out three meta-analyses based on, respectively, 2 data points and a total N=575; 15 data points and a total N=8100; 5 data points and a total N=730. In all three meta-analyses Spearman's hypothesis showed no supporting evidence with sample-size weighted correlations with values of, respectively, −.18, .01 and −.24. Correcting for reliability led to similar outcomes. Bypassing the unusual V/P profile by testing Spearman's hypothesis separately on Verbal subtests and Performance subtests led to a confirmation in approximately half of the comparisons. So, it could be that the unusual V/P profile obstructs support for Spearman's hypothesis in approximately half of the cases. We conclude that the anomalies appear to be more in line with Spearman's hypothesis than previously thought.

A White Slave in Africa: A Re-reading of Captivity Narratives

The term ‘captivity narratives’ has mostly been associated with the whites who were abducted by the indigenous tribes of America and who told and re-told their experiences after their release by ransom or escape. However, they were never perceived as slaves despite their accounts of being maltreated and over-worked under inhumane circumstances. They were merely captives. On the other hand, the story of the white prisoners who were abducted by Barbary ‘walking men’ in North Africa were categorized in almost all historical and literary chronicles as ‘slaves’. Over a period of almost three centuries, from the 17th till the 19th centuries, historian John Blasingame estimates that between half a million to one million white slaves were held in North Africa. The earliest literary account is that of the narrative of Abraham Browne, under the title A Book of Remembrance of Gods Provydences towards me in 1655.This paper attempts to trace and research through the reading of three American texts the complicated master-slave relationship and the related issues of cultural exchange, the eternal cross-crescent conflict, the stereotypical demonization of the other as well as the racial and religious prejudices and biases in tandem with New World politics. The proposed texts are Captain James Riley’s An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the Brig Commerce, wrecked on the coast of North Africa (1817) and its Sequel to Riley’s Narrative published a decade later from the personal possessions of Riley’s son. The third text is Dean King’s non-fiction book Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival which is based mainly on the two autobiographical narratives where King embarks on a sponsored expedition to retrace Riley’s journey across the Saharan desert

Biological Conditions and Economic Development: Nineteenth-Century Stature on the U.S. Great Plains.

Average stature is now a well-accepted measure of material and economic well-being in development studies when traditional measures are sparse or unreliable, but little work has been done on the biological conditions for individuals on the nineteenth-century U.S. Great Plains. Records of 14,427 inmates from the Nebraska state prison are used to examine the relationship between stature and economic conditions. Statures of both black and white prisoners in Nebraska increased through time, indicating that biological conditions improved as Nebraska's output market and agricultural sectors developed. The effect of rural environments on stature is illustrated by the fact that farm laborers were taller than common laborers. Urbanization and industrialization had significant impacts on stature, and proximity to trade routes and waterways was inversely related to stature.

Efficiency of health care in state correctional institutions.

Little is known about the efficiency of health care in correction settings. This article reports an efficiency analysis of health care in state correctional institutions (SCIs) in a single, mid-Atlantic state from 2003 to 2006. A two-stage data envelopment analysis was used to estimate the technical efficiency of prison health care and determine inmate and institutional characteristics that were associated with efficiency. Our output variable was the number of infirmary inpatient days for each year of study. The input variable for the first stage was the sum of personnel medical staff costs and other medical operating costs. SCIs with more white prisoners, older prisoners, and higher proportions of inmates with parole violations were significantly less efficient in their provision of health care than other SCIs. There were no SCI characteristics that were predictive of efficiency. These results suggest that healthcare efficiency in corrections may decline as the prison population continues to age.

Racial Disparity in Iowa Prisons: Possible Theoretical Explanations for Racial Differences Between Inmates on the Level of Service Inventory–Revised

This article presents a test of several theoretically informed hypotheses that characterize differences between Whites and African Americans incarcerated in the Iowa prison system. The authors judge differences by comparing inmates’ responses on the Level of Service Inventory–Revised or LSI-R, which is a standardized risk/need assessment instrument used to classify Iowa inmates. The hypotheses are based on ideas found in theories of structural distributive justice, general strain theory (GST), and macro-structural explanations of crime. Iowa is an interesting case study because it ranks near the top in the United States in the proportion of Black to White prisoner disparity. This disparity serves as a lens that sharpens distinctions between the populations. The findings suggest that in comparison to White prisoners, African American inmates have higher total LSI-R scores than White inmates and that prior to incarceration African American prisoners had more difficulty finding work, were more likely to have an official record of violent crime, and were more likely to associate with people who were involved in crime than were White inmates. Additionally, the results suggest that in comparison to White inmates, African American prisoners were more likely to feel that their prison sentences were unfair and to act in ways that were indicative of this. These findings are consistent with explanations found in macro-structural theories of crime as well as concepts found in GST and structural distributive justice theory. The authors briefly discuss the implications of these findings.

Prisoner Health and Valuation of Life, Loneliness, and Depressed Mood

To examine valuation of life, loneliness, and depressed mood as mediating the association between age and race/ethnicity and health outcomes among older adult male prisoners. Survey of 261 male prisoners ages 45-80 from 8 Oklahoma correctional facilities. African American prisoners report fewer health conditions than White prisoners - a finding mediated by significantly greater valuation of life, less loneliness, and lower depressed mood among African American prisoners. Older prisoners reported more health conditions than younger prisoners independent of other study variables. Results suggest improving inmates' internal states will reduce incidence of illness and disease among older male offenders and associated healthcare costs.

All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality Among Black and White North Carolina State Prisoners, 1995–2005

We compared mortality rates among state prisoners and other state residents to identify prisoners' health care needs. We linked North Carolina prison records with state death records for 1995-2005 to estimate all-cause and cause-specific death rates among black and white male prisoners ages 20-79 years and used standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) to compare these observed deaths with the expected number on the basis of death rates among state residents. The all-cause SMR of black prisoners was 0.52 (95% confidence interval, 0.48-0.57), with fewer deaths than expected from accidents, homicides, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The all-cause SMR of white prisoners was 1.12 (95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.25) with fewer deaths than expected for accidents but more deaths than expected from viral hepatitis, liver disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and HIV. The mortality of black prisoners was lower than that of black state residents for both traumatic and chronic causes of death. The mortality of white prisoners was lower than that of white state residents for accidents but greater for several chronic causes of death. Future studies should investigate the effect of prisoners' preincarceration and in-prison morbidity, the prison environment, and prison health care on prisoners' patterns of mortality.