In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons
became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent
conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively
slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by
Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas
presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and
disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary
cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the
labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to
accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade.
Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the
prisoners to fight for change.
Drawing from three
decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Robert T. Chase
narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged
an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas
prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and
Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as
“slaves of the state” and initiated a prison-made civil rights
revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal
legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to
be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the
increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of
white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison
organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves,
this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths
from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United
States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the
past to the mass incarceration of today.
Published in
association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies
at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas