Abstract
Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons, New York University Press: New York and London, 2012; 325 pp. including index: 9780814709405, $40.00
Doing Time offers a nuanced portrait of incarceration in a period that has been frequently overlooked by prison historiography. One of the book’s many strengths is the voluminous sources the author manages to weave into analysis and narrative, as well as its deft balancing of macro structural concerns (e.g. formal patterns of racial domination) with fine-grain attention to the minutia of inmate experience. In the Introduction, Blue notes that he was first drawn to the Depression years because he suspected that state prisons during this period ‘might have been sites of multiracial proletarian class formation’ (p. 8). Later in the book, he argues that California and Texas prisons actively worked to fracture collective class politics and generated social forces that reified racial difference and dishonor; officials imposed highly racialized and gendered hierarchies on their charges and sustained them by fostering mutual antagonism and violence.
Outwardly, California and Texas linked hard labor to progressive schemes of redemption, social inclusion, and citizenship. Yet behind prison walls, work compelled discipline and prison industries subsidized institutional costs in the context of state fiscal conservancy. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the premises of rehabilitation through work and the racial principle of ‘less eligibility’ that determined one’s place in the hierarchy of assignments. In Texas, labor essentially followed the pattern of the plantation economy and the convict lease. Black prisoners worked the state’s prison farms and cotton plantations; they toiled from sunup to sundown (or from ‘can shoot to can’t’) under the oversight of mounted guards with dogs. Such routinized degradation left convicts with few (often tragic) opportunities for self-affirmation. While some escaped or attacked their guards, others engaged in acts of sabotage or self-maiming. Yet the central, and perhaps most effective, source of resistance were work songs. Songs gave workers control over the pace of the production process, provided a means to articulate concern and support for one’s fellows, and shifted the terms and terrain of conflict through a subtle politics of memory.
Race also dominated assignment to the crowded and noisy jute mill at San Quentin or the rock quarry at Folsom, where prisoners labored under threat of respiratory disease and maimed limbs. Such assignments, little more than sheer repression, served to reify and sustain already-conferred positions of racial and disciplinary dishonor. Yet California’s ‘coercive meritocracy’ (p. 79) also encompassed more subtle and individualizing modes of subjugation. White prisoners in honor camps worked in forestry or built roads and lived outside prison walls in camps with low supervision; they ate well, earned a wage, and intermingled with free workers. Here, docility was secured through the impersonal compulsions of the market (e.g. camp provisions were provided to prisoners on credit). The repayment of debt and the expectation that camp members demonstrate financial savings (on pain of being sent back to prison) linked these prisoners with emergent patterns of ‘self-management’, consumption, and credit in wider society.
If race was ‘fixed’ at the time of admission and determined everything from work and housing arrangements to healthcare access, masculinity was highly fluid and daily negotiated, challenged, and (re)claimed. Indeed, Doing Time is at its best where it engages this contested terrain as well as the complex subordinations, forms of resistance, and modes of agency that officials’ gendered social control strategies enabled, mobilized, and deferred. For example, Chapter 4 compares the ‘braided overt and covert economies of cash, favors, contraband, sex and sexual violence through which Texas and California institutions functioned’ (p. 18). In Texas, Building Tenders (selected from the most brutal prisoners to serve as trustees) drew status and authority through violence, particularly sexual violence, and their responsibility over dormitory life. They were armed by guards and sanctioned as unofficial agents of the State even as they generated controversy among liberal elements of the penal elite. In contrast, California’s Con Bosses drew authority through their position in the prison bureaucracy and their control over official and unofficial commodity markets. Although violence remained an important signifier and guarantor of masculinity, Con Bosses supplemented violence with reputation, money, entrepreneurship, and managerial acumen. In this sense, both Building Tenders and Con Bosses embodied distinct hegemonic representations of masculinity shaped as much by the history of state economic development (e.g. slavery versus the factory) as by the internal organization of work and the politics of institutional control.
Chapters 5 and 6 explore the role of prisoners as cultural producers and entertainers. In a fascinating discussion of variety format radio shows like Thirty Minutes behind the Walls or San Quentin on the Air, Blue argues that radio provided officials with a new medium for articulating the reformative and progressive capacities of the system (and rhetorically undercutting its structural violence) even as it reinforced existing racial and class hierarchies. For example, although Black and Mexican prisoners served as entertainers and musicians, carefully screened white prisoners were interviewed and promoted as redeemable citizens. Despite this, music (particularly working-class musical traditions) was central to the program and formed much of its bulk. Thus, Thirty Minutes paradoxically tended to valorize the very voices and experiences it sought to silence: ‘[t]hough the pedagogy of prison radio starkly defined racial difference, the very music it presented was a hybrid of raced musical styles’ (p. 138). Similarly, baseball games, boxing, rodeos, and public celebrations emphasized the progressive credentials of officials, provided important admission revenues, and helped manage the tension and aggression generated by incarceration. At the same time, these events worked against the effects of depersonalization through labor and linked discipline to the ‘pleasures’ of bodily exertion. Sport and music mobilized different behaviors and meanings among prisoners and granted them access to roles, identities, and attitudes prominent in mass culture and civil society but ordinarily foreclosed in the routine of prison life.
Chapter 7 deals with death and dying: it argues that the prison’s prolific capacity to generate inmate deaths through violence, disease, and legal executions came to function as a surrogate for the lynch mob. Chapter 8 explores how, despite the increasing bureaucratic formalism of parole and pardon, early release decisions were significantly shaped by racial and class anxieties and remained embedded in local patronage networks. Given its breadth and its engaging writing, Doing Time would be a valuable addition to any graduate or undergraduate seminar that deals with the sociology and politics of punishment or with the critical historiography of criminal justice.