Testimonios of Resistance

Chapter 8 analyzes how legal testimonies and documentation became “testimonios of resistance” that crafted an effective narrative that southern prisons and prison labor constituted slavery. The chapter begins with the story of David Ruíz and follows with several other Chicano testimonios. By telling Ruiz’s story, this chapter considers the terror of racial violence, the necessity of self-defense, and the agony of self-mutilation. The chapter then broadens the movement to include the Black Panther Jonathan Eduardo Swift and a cadre of political organizers who spread the word of prisoner empowerment. Once the testimonies had developed into a mass movement, the prisoners planned the first ever system-wide prison labor strike just as the Ruiz case was going to trial. As black and Chicano radical organizers, they waged a public campaign to make the conditions of the southern prison plantation visible by insisting that the Texas control penology and agribusiness model was built on a lie—that incarceration amounted to twentieth-century slavery.

A Fine Southern Plantation

The second chapter offers an analysis of how the reforms refashioned prison labor as the new tool of disciplinary control and racial hierarchy within a Jim Crow framework. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business-oriented enterprise as a modernization narrative. What fuelled the modernization narrative, however, was coerced field labor and a regime of labor division that prioritized prisoners through gender, racial, and sexual power. By moving beyond control penology’s external modernization narrative and dissecting how prison labor disciplined, ordered, and controlled every aspect of southern incarceration, this chapter shows how incarceration on the Texas prison plantation rendered Black, Brown, and even white bodies as slave labor where the state relegated prisoners to coerced and entirely unpaid labor, daily acts of bodily degradation, and the perpetual denial of civil and human rights. As an analysis of prison labor as carceral power, chapter two also analyzes how prisoners carved out hidden transcripts of resistance and survival that constructed a dissident culture and infrapolitics to trouble the southern modernization narrative.

Stuck between Justice and the Carceral State

Chapter 9 analyzes the Ruiz trial itself as drawing from prisoner-initiated narrative, but it situates even the most far-reaching courtroom victory within a political arrangement of carceral massive resistance, where southern Democrats resisted court orders and new southern Republicans consciously reinterpreted the court’s intent as part of mass incarceration’s broader political project. In the immediate aftermath of the 1980 Ruiz decision, the prisoners’ courtroom victory was stuck over a political struggle between the state and the federal system. Prisoners were at the mercy of a variation on “massive resistance,” where the TDC resisted federal court intervention at every turn. Making matters worse, as mass incarceration was now fully taking hold, the prisons were becoming more and more overcrowded and prone to violence. Trapped between the court and the state, prisoners had fewer external political allies as the 1980s dawned.

Attica South

This chapter narrates the moment when mass incarceration cast more and more African Americans into prison during the decade of the 1970s. As such, the chapter illustrates how the onset of mass incarceration swept onto southern prison plantations a younger generation who not only had witnessed 1960s era civil rights protest, but several of whom were active veterans of the Vietnam War, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers, and local Black Power groups. This chapter offers a reconceptualization of Black masculinity as African American men in both Texas and Louisiana’s Angola responded to the prison’s sexual violence with a communitarian-grounded defense of one another and the sanctity of their bodies. Chapter 6 offers the simultaneous narrative of African American politicians elected in the wake of the civil rights movement who sought prison reform, alongside radical black political organizing against the prison plantation. In response to growing fears that “Attica” might come South, Texas prison administrators doubled down on the southern trusty system and looked to “get tough” on civil rights agitation by bringing in new leadership with experience in quelling Black radicalism and civil rights suits.

Eight Hoe—Sowing Seeds of Dissension

Chapter 5 broadens Cruz’s story to include a collective of fellow prisoners, particularly Muslims, within an inter-racial alliance to make prisoner litigation and legal documentation as politicization and a prison-made civil rights revolution. The chapter considers how Muslim prisoners looked to their religious conversion for empowerment, community, and spiritual fulfilment. When the prison administration encountered a small, but growing, number of Muslims, it attempted to quarantine them from other prisoners and deny them their religious freedom. As a result, Fred Cruz found allies among the Muslims even as he found a new external ally, an anti-poverty lawyer named Frances Freeman Jalet, who pursued the claims of these prisoners as a matter of civil rights. In response to the development of civil rights work among the prisoners, the prison administration collected Jalet’s clients onto a single wing known as Eight Hoe for their field line number. This chapter analyzes the struggle over Eight Hoe as a widening base of prison civil rights work and grass-roots activism. Their collective effort served as notice to the other prisoners that prisoners had a champion outside of the prison and that the courts were paying attention.

Epilogue

The epilogue reflects on what happened to the prisoners who brought civil suits to Texas and frames the legal and political legacy of Ruiz within the current political moment of national prison strikes and the ongoing struggle over mass incarceration. The chapter considers Ruiz’s legacy through the lens of the Tennessee prison hostage crisis of 1985 as well as ongoing contemporary prisoner politicization over mass incarceration. It considers the development of the Prison Litigation Reform Act as part of carceral federalism’s effort to overturn judicial intervention in favor a return to state’s rights and control of its prison systems. It concludes with an analysis the country’s first national prison strikes of 2016 and 2018 as critical moments tied to Ruiz and the case’s political legacy.

Enslaving Prison Bodies

Chapter 3 moves from the field to the prison building to reveal how hierarchical prisoner labor arrangements structured an internal prison economy that bought and sold prisoner bodies and services as cell slavery. By narrating southern prisons’ shift from dormitories to cells, this chapter will show how the power and control of prisoner trustees was strengthened by the changes. Within the southern convict guard framework, prison rape is analyzed as a state-orchestrated design rather than as an individual act pf prisoner pathology. Through an analysis of sexual violence in male prisons as a social construct of the southern trustee system, this chapter joins in a historical turn toward placing sexual violence at the very center of racial oppression. Seeking to take prison rape seriously as evidence of evolving state control and orchestration, the chapter pushes against the criminological view that has cast prison rape as a timeless function of the prisoners’ own pathology. The chapter also considers how women prisoners experienced the southern trusty system and the state’s attempt to isolate and target women that the prison classified as the “aggressive female homosexual.”

Fears of Contagion, Strategies of Containment

The first chapter offers an analysis of prison reform through the lens of sexualized containment, where elite northern reformers sought to replace the notorious 1940s prison farm and open dormitory system with the best practices of northern criminal justice and blended with a southern work model to create an efficient, business-oriented agricultural enterprise system. During the 1940s and 1950s, postwar criminologists employed metaphors of disease and contagion that warned that prison sex and sexual violence between men could spread from one prisoner to another. In the U.S. South, the practice of housing prisoners in labor camps and shared dormitories contributed to the metaphor of disease and contagion, a particular fear that the South’s open living spaces hastened the southern prison’s production of homosexuality. The chapter argues that such a Cold War–era reform plan stressed the social quarantine of prisoners through the adoption of the northern penitentiary’s design of cells and wings as a way to contain the sexual violence that occurred all too frequently in open southern dormitories. Such an external emphasis on prison space and containment had profound consequences, as it enhanced the spatial power and reach of an internal trusty where the prison system relied on prisoners as guards.

From Pachuco to Writ Writer

Chapter four initiates the second part of the book, subtitled “Resistance,” where the next five chapters reflect on the prisoners’ evolution from individual consciousness to legal documentation, solidarity, and eventually collective resistance. Chapter four offers an intimate narrative of how a single prisoner, Fred Cruz, underwent a process of intellectual transformation, a mind change, and conscientizaciónto launch the beginning of the prisoners’ rights movement in Texas. Based on Cruz’s personal diary and letters, this chapter considers how Cruz underwent “carceral rehabilitation” through an intellectual engagement with civil rights and criminal law, as well as personal transformation through reading deeply in political philosophy and his conversion to Buddhist religion. Despite often being cast into solitary confinement for his legal work, this chapter demonstrates that Cruz was not isolated, as the chapter charts Cruz’s transformation within the broader legal turn in the law that allowed prisoners to turn to federal courts as a matter of civil rights. As such, it places the “slaves of the state” narrative in proper legal context where prisoners were not slaves, but entitled to civil rights, even as prisoners experienced de facto conditions of abuse and racial power that rendered their prison labor and lives as akin to slavery. Cruz’s story is presented as the spark for what will become a system-wide prison movement for civil rights.

The Aztlán Outlaw and Black Reform Politics

Chapter 7 takes up the state’s most famous prison hostage crisis to analyze prisoner Fred Carrasco as an Aztlán outlaw who drew on nationalist and Chicano ideologies to critique the prison plantation, while also showing how this moment of carceral violence contrasted with and derailed the hopes of African American political reformers. Carrasco’s hostage crisis also offers a critical historical parallel to Reies Tijerina’s 1967 raid of a New Mexico courthouse to demand land grant rights. This chapter offers Carrasco’s hostage crisis alongside the historical context of Chicano nationalist demands, particularly Reies Tijerina’s 1967 raid of a New Mexico courthouse to demand land grant rights. Both the Alianza courthouse encounter with criminal justice and the Carrasco hostage crisis drew upon a history of violent border confrontation with border police and the Texas Rangers, that stretched across time and borders. This chapter concludes, however, with the prison reality that the Carrasco’s hostage crisis dashed the hopes of Black political reformers at a crucial moment in their legislative campaign.