Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South

Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South PDF Author: Martha A. Myers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
For Emile Durkheim, writing in the nineteenth-century, punishment was simply understood as a clear response to the criminal behavior a society experiences. Today's penal institutions challenge such a simple understanding. Inseparably linked with many aspects of society, they are profoundly shaped by the traumatic events and changes a society undergoes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the American South.Georgia embraced the concept of the penitentiary as a form of social control earlier than most of its southern neighbors. Its penal code of 1816 replaced or curtailed such traditional punishments as whipping, the pillory, fines, or death. Georgia's control over felony convicts effectively began in 1817, when the state prison at Milledgeville accepted its first convict.Martha A. Myers finds that Georgia also led the region in embracing the convict lease system as an alternative to incarceration. In Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, she examines the social, political, and economic forces that shaped punishment over a seventy-year period. Between 1870 and 1940, Georgia's system of punishment shifted from capital and corporal punishment to hard labor in the penitentiary, then to the convict lease system, then to county-run chain gangs, and then back to incarceration in prison. This book forges a connection between these dramatic shifts and analyzes three facets of punishment for black and white men: rates of admission to the penitentiary, the harshness of sentences, and the ease with which felons achieved release from the penitentiary. Her findings challenge the conventional notion that hard times invariably prompt harsh punishment. In uncovering the complex link betweensocial change and southern punishment, Myers reveals the poverty of current theories of criminal punishment.

Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South

Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South PDF Author: Martha A. Myers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book

Book Description
For Emile Durkheim, writing in the nineteenth-century, punishment was simply understood as a clear response to the criminal behavior a society experiences. Today's penal institutions challenge such a simple understanding. Inseparably linked with many aspects of society, they are profoundly shaped by the traumatic events and changes a society undergoes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the American South.Georgia embraced the concept of the penitentiary as a form of social control earlier than most of its southern neighbors. Its penal code of 1816 replaced or curtailed such traditional punishments as whipping, the pillory, fines, or death. Georgia's control over felony convicts effectively began in 1817, when the state prison at Milledgeville accepted its first convict.Martha A. Myers finds that Georgia also led the region in embracing the convict lease system as an alternative to incarceration. In Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, she examines the social, political, and economic forces that shaped punishment over a seventy-year period. Between 1870 and 1940, Georgia's system of punishment shifted from capital and corporal punishment to hard labor in the penitentiary, then to the convict lease system, then to county-run chain gangs, and then back to incarceration in prison. This book forges a connection between these dramatic shifts and analyzes three facets of punishment for black and white men: rates of admission to the penitentiary, the harshness of sentences, and the ease with which felons achieved release from the penitentiary. Her findings challenge the conventional notion that hard times invariably prompt harsh punishment. In uncovering the complex link betweensocial change and southern punishment, Myers reveals the poverty of current theories of criminal punishment.

Twice the Work of Free Labor

Twice the Work of Free Labor PDF Author: Alexander C. Lichtenstein
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9781859840863
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Twice the Work of Free Labor is both a study of penal labor in the southern United States, and a revisionist analysis of the political economy of the South after the Civil War.

Chained in Silence

Chained in Silence PDF Author: Talitha L. LeFlouria
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469622483
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, Talitha L. LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time.

Capital and Convict

Capital and Convict PDF Author: Henry Kamerling
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Both in the popular imagination and in academic discourse, North and South are presented as fundamentally divergent penal systems in the aftermath of the Civil War, a difference mapped onto larger perceived cultural disparities between the two regions. The South’s post Civil War embrace of chain gangs and convict leasing occupies such a prominent position in the nation’s imagination that it has come to represent one of the region’s hallmark differences from the North. The regions are different, the argument goes, because they punish differently. Capital and Convict challenges this assumption by offering a comparative study of Illinois’s and South Carolina’s formal state penal systems in the fifty years after the Civil War. Henry Kamerling argues that although punishment was racially inflected both during Reconstruction and after, shared, nonracial factors defined both states' penal systems throughout this period. The similarities in the lived experiences of inmates in both states suggest that the popular focus on the racial characteristics of southern punishment has shielded us from an examination of important underlying factors that prove just as central—if not more so—in shaping the realities of crime and punishment throughout the United States.

Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name PDF Author: Douglas A. Blackmon
Publisher: Icon Books
ISBN: 1848314132
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

After Slavery

After Slavery PDF Author: Bruce E. Baker
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Moves beyond broad generalizations concerning black life during Reconstruction in order to address the varied experiences of freed slaves across the South. This collection examines urban unrest in New Orleans and Wilmington, North Carolina, loyalty among former slave owners and slaves in Mississippi, armed insurrection along the Georgia coast, racial violence throughout the region, and much more in order to provide a well-rounded portrait of the era.

Life and Labor in the New New South

Life and Labor in the New New South PDF Author: Robert H. Zieger
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813042720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores the dynamic new face of Southern labor since 1950. Life and Labor in the New New South weaves together the best work of established scholars with emerging cutting-edge research on ethnicity, gender, prison labor, de-industrialization, rapidly changing demographic and employment patterns, and popular response to globalization.

Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South

Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South PDF Author: Martha A. Myers
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
For Emile Durkheim, writing in the nineteenth-century, punishment was simply understood as a clear response to the criminal behavior a society experiences. Today's penal institutions challenge such a simple understanding. Inseparably linked with many aspects of society, they are profoundly shaped by the traumatic events and changes a society undergoes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the American South. Georgia embraced the concept of the penitentiary as a form of social control earlier than most of its southern neighbors. Its penal code of 1816 replaced or curtailed such traditional punishments as whipping, the pillory, fines, or death. Georgia's control over felony convicts effectively began in 1817, when the state prison at Milledgeville accepted its first convict. Martha A. Myers finds that Georgia also led the region in embracing the convict lease system as an alternative to incarceration. In Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, she examines the social, political, and economic forces that shaped punishment over a seventy-year period. Between 1870 and 1940, Georgia's system of punishment shifted from capital and corporal punishment to hard labor in the penitentiary, then to the convict lease system, then to county-run chain gangs, and then back to incarceration in prison. This book forges a connection between these dramatic shifts and analyzes three facets of punishment for black and white men: rates of admission to the penitentiary, the harshness of sentences, and the ease with which felons achieved release from the penitentiary. Her findings challenge the conventional notion that hard times invariably prompt harsh punishment. In uncovering the complex link betweensocial change and southern punishment, Myers reveals the poverty of current theories of criminal punishment.

Caging Borders and Carceral States

Caging Borders and Carceral States PDF Author: Robert T. Chase
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469651254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
This volume considers the interconnection of racial oppression in the U.S. South and West, presenting thirteen case studies that explore the ways in which citizens and migrants alike have been caged, detained, deported, and incarcerated, and what these practices tell us about state building, converging and coercive legal powers, and national sovereignty. As these studies depict the institutional development and state scaffolding of overlapping carceral regimes, they also consider how prisoners and immigrants resisted such oppression and violence by drawing on the transnational politics of human rights and liberation, transcending the isolation of incarceration, detention, deportation and the boundaries of domestic law. Contributors: Dan Berger, Ethan Blue, George T. Diaz, David Hernandez, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Pippa Holloway, Volker Janssen, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Heather McCarty, Douglas K. Miller, Vivien Miller, Donna Murch, and Keramet Ann Reiter.

Race, Gender, and Punishment

Race, Gender, and Punishment PDF Author: Mary Bosworth
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813539041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In this book, Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin bring together twelve original essays by prominent scholars to examine not only the discrimination that is evident, but also the structural and cultural forces that have influenced and continue to perpetuate the current situation. Contributors point to four major factors that have impacted public sentiment and criminal justice policy: colonialism, slavery, immigration, and globalization. In doing so they reveal how practices of punishment not only need particular ideas about race to exist, but they also legitimate them.