Crime, Punishment, Labor and Race

...But flee many did, in search of landowners who would not cheat or abuse them, or jobs in the city, or better lives up North...

...In its place, Mississippi's Governor James Vardaman—a friend of lynch mobs and the little guy, and foe of planters, industrialists...

...A Federal judge ruled that Parchman deprived its inmates of numerous constitutional rights...

...With convict leasing, the white South eased its crime and its labor problems in one fell swoop...

...And the book reads like a quietly powerful piece of music, less blues than jazz?variations on the themes of crime, punishment, labor, and race...

...Since it was illegal for croppers to quit a contract while they were in debt, they often had to sneak away...

...A man who forged orders for nine quarts of whiskey was sentenced to 36 years...

...In Arkansas they blasted tunnels...

...about the turn to biology to explain poverty and inequality...

...In his Prologue, Oshinsky takes us back to antebellum Mississippi, a gruesome place where alcohol, ideas of honor and equality among white men, a shortage of sheriffs and judges, and a criminal code so draconian that it was rarely used gave rise to communities in which eye-gouging, stabbing, dueling, lynching, and murder were routine...

...Mississippi Republicans had thought of convict leasing as a temporary measure, but they were routed in 1875...

...In Alabama and Georgia, they mined coal...

...It made money from inmate labor until the early 1970s, when civil rights lawyers joined by President Richard M. Nixon's Justice Department filed suit on behalf of a few fearless prisoners...

...Under the formal system, a few lucky convict contractors were charged a monthly fee for each prisoner...

...Sharecropping, the form of agriculture and system of credit that shaped the region's labor and life between Appomattox and World War II, was not worse than slavery...

...Yet in the stones he tells (about the obsession with black-on-white crime that bore only the slightest relation to the actual issue of crime...

...author...

...Overall, the narrative moves from past to present, but Oshinsky doesn't hesitate to break the flow for riffs on the mechanics of share-cropping, the nuances of caste, the emergence of scientific racism, the efforts of early 20th-century black scholars to understand black crime, and more...

...about crime bills...

...Because sheriffs and judges received bounties from employers, a sudden need for labor could provoke a crime wave...

...Each year thousands of black Southerners were sentenced to hard labor: A six-year-old girl was sentenced to 30 days for stealing a hat...

...The new Democratic Legislature's first order of business was passing a series of crime bills that made the theft of a pig "grand larceny" and authorized the state to lease its convicts...

...Counties and towns were also allowed to work or lease their prisoners...

...His sources include plantation records, pardon files, reports on penitentiaries, folklore, interviews, and scores of long forgotten invaluable works of history and anthropology...

...Thus white Southerners denied black people education, then concluded they were naturally ignorant...

...Hanard...

...A 13-year-old was sentenced to 10 years for burglary with intent to rape...

...In Tennessee, convicts built railroads...

...In Florida, a turpentine operator and a sheriff made up a list of 80 black people "capable of a fair day's work...

...Worse still was the terrorism of white Southerners...

...When it soared, it confirmed the white Southerners' conclusion that stealing, knifing and shooting were in the Negro's nature...

...Nor does he refer explicitly to the parallels between the "problem" of crime in the New South and the problem of crime today...

...about the disproportionate number of black people in prison and on death row...

...The contractors could then sublease them to agriculture and industry...

...Negroes wouldn't work unless they were forced to...

...Nevertheless, it did mean their masters were less inclined to kill them than white Mississippians were inclined to kill one another...

...What those commentators had in common was white skin, and nostalgia for the Old South...

...Then, as now, African Americans were caught in a vicious cycle: Prejudice and discrimination contributed to social conditions that guaranteed both a long life...

...The solution settled on was convict leasing, a practice that began in Mississippi in 1868 when the Reconstruction government agreed to pay Edmund Richardson $18,000 a year plus transportation costs to oversee the state's prisoners...

...his accomplice received 18...

...In Texas, they milled lumber and worked sugar fields...

...He has a revealing chapter about Parchman pardons, and another on capital punishment...

...Oshinsky writes, served "a cultural need by strengthening the walls of white supremacy as the South moved from an era of racial bondage to one of racial caste...

...It discouraged free laborers from fighting for higher wages or better working conditions: they knew they could easily and cheaply be replaced...

...The old enemies are not even all dead...

...Dozens died of disease and gunshot wounds...

...When planters and merchants regained complete control over credit, law enforcement, courts, and legislatures in the mid-1870s, they again dominated most aspects of croppers' working lives...

...With its predominantly black population, dawn to dusk toil in cotton fields, armed black overseers on horseback, rows of wooden prison quarters, and brutal physical punishments, Parchman reminded many observers of slavery...

...Convict leasing meant huge profits for a few businessmen, revenue for state and local governments, and lower taxes for everyone...

...The system...

...In Florida they extracted turpentine from longleaf pines...

...Convict laborers were better off than Negroes who remained free...

...Horse Than Slavery' is graced with the lyrics to songs, most of them blues, about life on chain gangs and prison farms...

...about the privatization of punishment), and in the historical questions he pauses to analyze (including dependency and black-on-black crime) Oshinsky brings numerous parallels to the fore...

...Vardaman's legacy was Parchman Prison, 20,000 acres of Mississippi's Yazoo Delta...

...No penalty benefited them more, an Alabama governor said, than the "hardships of labor in [our] mines...

...It was not until the early 20th century, when humanitarians were joined by populists, who charged that the system was one more giveaway to the rich, that opponents of convict leasing gained the upper hand...

...Credit, law and brute force were used to make them dependent on landlords and merchants for housing, livestock, tools, seed, food, and clothing, then they were declared incapable of taking responsibility for their own lives...

...Richardson got rich...

...Most Americans know even less about the period it covers than they know about slavery—which is part of the reason why, in current debates about racial inequality, the phrase "the legacy of slavery" has become longhand for the word "history," a code that encourages a misleading mental leap from 1865 to 1965...

...Occasionally humanitarians protested, but they were overwhelmed by the system's defenders, who for a host of self-serving reasons insisted there was no other way: Negroes didn't regard ordinary confinement as punishment...

...Railroad workers lived in rolling cages...

...Within a few weeks, the sheriff had arrested all 80 on petty charges...

...The title of David Oshinsky's timely book invites the question, for throughout the century after emancipation numerous Southerners—plain folk, social scientists, scientists, even historians?argued that freedom itself was worse for black people than slavery...

...Reviewed by James Goodman Associate Professor of history and social studies...

...Republicans, and "black brutes"—dreamed of a great, modern prison farm where Negroes who knew their place could learn to control their instincts and do an honest day's work...

...That didn't mean they were treated well or punished fairly...

...Oshinsky reminds us that between Reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act there was a long century, a lot of change and pain...

...Crime was a terrible problem, but it was a white problem, nothing that couldn't be ameliorated by revising the criminal code and building a new state penitentiary...

...But profits weren't convict leasing's only bottom line...

...Richardson kept white convicts in the penitentiary and sent black convicts to his Delta plantation, where they built levees, cleared swampland and plowed the fields...

...Black Mississippians were punished (and protected from random white violence) by their masters...

...But the state's prisons were in ruins and there was no money to repair them, let alone build more...

...a little colored boy" to a year for shooting craps...

...In labor camps and on farms they learned discipline...

...But he makes no claim for the "newness" of his sources or his subject, or for comprehensiveness or heretofore untouched depths...

...Oshinsky shows us that when it comes to crime, punishment and race, "that" is very recent history...

...Black Southerners built the New South, and for their labor they received as little gratitude and reward, and often as much grief, as their parents and grandparents had received for building the old one...

...Countless black Southerners caught in the jaws of the postwar criminal justice system were not even that free, however, and it is the experience of these people—on chain gangs, in convict labor camps, and on prison farms—that Oshinsky has written about...

...Stories of Scottsboro " WHAT, EXACTLY, was worse than slavery...

...He says nothing about how he became interested in Parchman...

...Black convicts were put in cages, mines and malarial swamps, and when they died in great numbers their deaths were attributed to physical inferiority and debasing habits...

...Africa was on the rampage," one observer wrote, referring to what he and many other white Mississippians perceived as an epidemic of theft, burglary, arson, and (most troubling of all to planters) vagrancy...

...This beautifully written book deserves a wide audience, and we will all be better off if it finds one...

...Whites cheated blacks at settlement time, convicted them of crimes they didn't commit, lynched them for the slightest breach of racial etiquette or no reason at all, then wondered why black people had no respect for the law...

...In a region where dark skin and forced labor went hand in hand, leasing would become a functional replacement for slavery, a human bridge between the Old South and the New...

...It evolved during Reconstruction as a compromise between planters—who wanted slaves—and former slaves, who wanted, at the very least, their own land and the economic freedom and autonomy they believed it would bring...

...The Souths economic development," Oshinsky writes, "can be traced by the blood of its prisoners...

...if a convict died...

...That's history—an obsession with old enemies," most Americans seem to be saying today when arguing against affirmative action or proposals for a New Deal or Marshall Plan for our inner cities...

...They overthrew Reconstruction-era governments and reforms, enforced unfair agricultural agreements, pushed black people out of politics, and punished those who crossed them in any way...

...With emancipation, the crime problem turned black...

...For those who stayed the unwritten codes, habits, and eventually laws of caste and segregation were as exacting and humiliating as any relationship with creditors...

...Cotton pickers often slept in the fields, in chains...

...An eight-year-old was given a two-year sentence for stealing some change off a counter...

...As severely circumscribed as the scope of their freedom was, though—by landlessness, debt, custom, law, violence, and having most avenues of resistance closed—freedmen and freedwomen insisted that "nothing but freedom" was better than no freedom at all...

...He takes his title from a passage in a 1930 history of Mississippi's state penitentiary, Parchman Farm: "The convict's condition [following the Civil War] was much worse than slavery...

...or where his account fits into the existing literature...

...The life of the slave was valuable to his master, but there was no financial loss...

...Convicts clearing a malarial swamp near Hattiesburg were "chained for days in knee-deep pools of muck, 'their thirst driving them to drink water in which they were compelled to deposit excrement.' "In 1882, the mortality rate for Mississippi's black prisoners was 17 per cent...

...Yet even at its worst, on the vast, brutally policed plantations of the Mississippi Delta, where sharecropping was merely another word for debt peonage, croppers had it better than slaves, if only because the odds were better for those who decided to flee...

...Black-on-black crime was shrugged off as what Negroes did...