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Book Cover
E-book
Author Chase, Robert T., author.

Title We are not slaves : state violence, coerced labor, and prisoners' rights in postwar America / Robert T. Chase
Published Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2020]
©2020

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Description 1 online resource : illustrations, maps
Series Justice, power, and politics
Justice, power, and politics.
Contents Cover -- Contents -- Abbreviations in the text -- Introduction -- Part I: A biography of coerced labor and state violence -- Fears of contagion, strategies of containment : pathologizing homosexuality, incarcerating bodies, and reshaping the southern prison farm -- A fine southern plantation : perfecting prison slave labor as the agribusiness model -- Enslaving prison bodies : labor division, prison rape, and the internal prison economy -- Part II: Resistance -- From Pachuco to writ writer : the carceral rehabilitation of Fred Cruz -- Eight hoe-sowing seeds of dissension : Chicanos and Muslims make a prison-made civil rights revolution -- Attica South : black political organizing against the prison plantation -- The Aztlán outlaw and black reform politics : the Carrasco hostage crisis and the collapse of political reform -- Testimonios of resistance : the slave narrative and the prison labor strike of 1978 -- Stuck between justice and the carceral state : Ruiz v. Estelle and the politics of mass incarceration -- War on the prison insurgent : prison gangs, the militarized prison, and the persistence of carceral violence -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Index of Cases
Summary "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. However, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, and the 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. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book highlights untold but devastatingly important truths about the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States."-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from resource home page (JSTOR, viewed December 21, 2020)
Subject Prisoners -- Civil rights -- Texas -- History -- 20th century
Prisoners -- Civil rights -- Southern States -- History -- 20th century
Convict labor -- Southern States -- History -- 20th century
Prisoners -- Violence against -- Southern States -- History -- 20th century
African American prisoners.
Mexican American prisoners.
HISTORY -- African American.
African American prisoners
Convict labor
Mexican American prisoners
Prisoners -- Civil rights
Race relations
SUBJECT Southern States -- Race relations -- History -- 20th century
Subject Southern States
Texas
Genre/Form Electronic books
History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781469653594
1469653591