For a global history of penal colonies and convict labor

Review of: ANDERSON, Clare (ed.). A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 408 p.

“Slaves of the State”: Christianity and Convict Labor in the Postbellum South

In the wake of the Civil War, southern states incarcerated record numbers of black men and women, closed their prisons, and sent convicted criminals to convict lease camps. Inside these camps, convict laborers worked for businesses, for individual entrepreneurs, on plantations, and on public works projects contracted to private businesses. Due to the Thirteenth Amendment’s “slaves of the state” clause, these laborers were legally classified as slaves and treated as such by labor camp operators. Conditions inside these camps were quite harsh, and in most camps, state-sanctioned Protestant socialization efforts were the laborers’ primary source of leisure. This essay provides a preliminary overview of the convergence of Protestant Christianity and convict lease camps as it calls scholars to explore this convergence in greater detail in future scholarship.

Miscellaneous

This chapter explores Article XXIII of the Oklahoma constitution. Section 1 promotes industrial welfare of the people by fixing a high standard for employees on public work. It states that “eight hours shall constitute a day’s work in all cases of employment by and on behalf of the State or any county or municipality.” Section 1A reflects the state’s concerns that no person be forced to participate in, or pay for, a labor union and its activities. Section 2 prohibits the contracting of convict labor, while Section 3 prohibits “the employment of children, under the age of fifteen years, in any occupation, injurious to health or morals or especially hazardous to life or limb.” Section 5 deals with the health and safety of employees in factories, in mines, and on railroads. Section 10 focuses on the salary and emoluments of public officials.

Colorado Honor Convicts: Roads, Reform, and Region in the Progressive Era

In the early twentieth century, many states turned to convict road labor in response to the clamor for good roads and the contemporaneous crisis of imprisonment. States, guided by the federal government that served as an information broker, developed two main types of convict labor program—the honor and guard systems. These systems differed by regional and local context. Colorado developed the honor form of convict labor based in Progressive principles. The Colorado system offers a case study in local conditions that took on national importance as Warden Thomas Tynan became enmeshed in a national network of Progressive penal reformers helping define state-run convict labor systems. This essay follows the reform ideology and financial incentives that drove Colorado's honor program, showing how capitalist labor motivations were balanced with ideals of reform. The honor system spread across the United States, and the story of this system complicates regional paradigms while highlighting national patterns. The story of honor guard convict labor and infrastructure development connects Progressive Era reform, penal reform, labor history, and regional and demographic patterns.

Archival and Digital Sources on Unfree Labor in Northern Nigeria

Unfree labor in Northern Nigeria is a subject of interest to an increasing number of scholars. The National Archives Kaduna (NAK) and other repositories in Northern Nigeria and elsewhere hold many records that are useful for the study of several forms of unfree labor that occurred within the present-day borders of Northern Nigeria. The history of these records is long, but most of the written records were produced in the period after 1800. The written materials are mainly in Arabic and English. Unlike the written records, the oral sources are mainly in the Hausa language and the collection of such oral information is related to the post-1960s efforts by scholars led primarily by Paul E. Lovejoy. Lovejoy also initiated the digitization of archival materials and oral sources related to unfree labor in Northern Nigeria in the early 2000s. The digitization effort is still ongoing. Scholars who have drawn on the available archival and digital material have focused on the theme of slavery in the precolonial era. Such scholars addressed several topics including plantation agriculture, military slavery, slave control, slave resistance, the ending of slavery, and the wages of slavery. Apart from the works on slavery that mainly focus on the 19th century, there are relatively few other works on the topic that have primarily dealt with the early colonial era or with the period between 1903 and 1936. While the history of slavery has attracted the most critical attention, the history of corvée and convict labor in Northern Nigeria has largely been neglected. Indeed, to date, only two works mainly deal with convict and corvée labor. Considering the little attention given to the themes of convict labor and corvée labor, there is clearly more room for additional historical works on these subjects than on the topic of slavery.

“Emancipated” African Americans

This chapter looks at the ways in which settler colonial interests have shaped social relations and governmental policies since the abolition of slavery. Following the Civil War, the gains of the Reconstruction era were quickly rolled back as formerly enslaved persons were geographically contained, subjected to social violence and terror, criminalized, and forced into convict labor. A pervasive system of apartheid was implemented and not legally dismantled until the 1950s, and racial segregation remains pervasive today. Despite the changes brought by the civil rights era, with deindustrialization African Americans have increasingly been viewed as a “surplus” population. One result has been the pervasive policing of Black communities and mass incarceration.

Conjure the Railroad

This chapter discusses how African Americans tried to harness the magic of the southern railroad and how white southerners tried to circumscribe this power. It opens with a discussion of the myth of Black Ulysses and black folk songs to show how black men would “conjure the railroad” and invoke its magic as they toiled to build lines and moves into a discussion of the racialized convict labor system that companies used to build much of the railroad mileage in the South. In other aspects of railroad labor, white officials limited advancement of black workers and kept them in subservient roles like the Pullman Porter. Through a discussion of travel narratives, the chapter shows how white travellers used the railroad to apply new pernicious stereotypes to African Americans. While black activists like Ida B. Wells tried to fight for equal access to rail travel, white authorities moved to segregate railroads and the supreme court case that ultimately enshrined Jim Crow segregation – Plessy v Ferguson – took place after a challenge to a railroad’s segregation policies.

Menacing (Re)Production

The chapter reconsiders Georgia’s chain gang labor system by shifting the lens from the Jim Crow South’s convict labor production to the medicalized control over incarcerated Black women’s reproduction. In its exploration of medicalized language and the role of doctors in convict labor camps, this chapter explores how incarcerated black women experienced reproductive exploitation and control after the Civil War. At the heart of this essay is the Jim Crow South’s broader assault on black motherhood and the ways in which the Southern convict labor camp was a site meant to regulate labor production and human reproduction as shared elements of a carceral network. During slavery, black women’s wombs were commodified. After slavery, they were no longer of value. The chapter concludes that the regulation of black woman and motherhood at the site of Southern prisons had deleterious consequences for black women and the black family that stretched beyond the prison.

Liberated Africans, Slaves, and Convict Labor in the Construction of Rio de Janeiro's Casa de Correção: Atlantic Labor Regimes and Confinement in Brazil's Port City

From 1834 to 1850, Latin America's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção in Rio de Janeiro, was a construction site where slaves, “liberated Africans”, convicts, and unfree workers interacted daily, forged identities, and deployed resistance strategies against the pressures of confinement and the demands of Brazil's eclectic labor regimes. This article examines the utilization of this motley crew of workers, the interactions among “liberated Africans”, slaves, and convict laborers, and the government's intervention between 1848 and 1850 to restrict slave labor at the prison in favor of free waged workers. It asserts that the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 and the subsequent inauguration of the penitentiary augured profound changes in Rio's labor landscape, from a predominantly unfree to a free wage labor force.