Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida’s “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs by Vivien M. L. Miller (review)

In Hard Labor and Hard Time, historian Vivien Miller breaks new ground and de-centers Georgia as the chain-gang capital of the South. In this brilliant, well written, and rigorously researched study, Miller provides a history of Florida’s prison system during the first half of the twentieth century (1900–50). With this book, she deftly illustrates that Florida, not Georgia, had the longest-running and most resilient chain-gang system in the South, and she carefully reminds readers of a crucial yet overlooked fact: “Life and labor on Florida’s chain gangs [was] as brutal as in neighboring Georgia” (3). Miller also carefully situates the state farm at Raiford within a broader historical discourse on convict labor, prison reform, and the evolving carceral trends of the twentieth century. In so doing, she shifts our focus away from the Parchman prison farm in Mississippi and the Angola plantation in Louisiana, and forces us to take a look at the state farm in Florida—the third largest prison plantation in the United States.

With candor and meticulous detail, Miller draws out the contradictions inherent in Florida’s “progressive” penal reform movement, showing how the continuing cruelties of the convict lease system also persisted in the state’s chain-gang camps and at the state prison farm. According to Miller, as late as the 1950s, after the first wave of progressive reform supposedly washed away the most toxic elements of Florida’s penal system, black and white male prisoners alike were privy to brutal forms of punishment and torture. In this way, she shows that Florida’s penal regimes were everything but modern, preserving the volatility and unbridled violence of the postbellum carceral state.

In this book, Miller lives up to her reputation as a painstaking researcher. Using an extensive range of primary sources—including but not limited to biennial reports of the Florida Division of Corrections, prison registers, criminal case files, census records, governor’s records, FBI investigative and administrative files, records of the Works Progress Administration, papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and reports from the Board of Commissioners of State Institutions—she recovers the lived and laboring experiences of the state’s prisoners, women included. Women are mentioned sparingly, owing to the sheer dearth of available historical evidence, but Miller makes an earnest attempt to illustrate how female convicts fared at Raiford. Her attention to gender is important and on par with evolving trends in the historiography.

In her section “Women in an Ultramasculine World,” Miller shows how the spheres of labor and leisure were not always divided along lines of gender. At work, women labored separately from male prisoners and performed “women’s work.” But during leisure hours, this same gender separation was not as rigidly enforced. Miller notes that on Sundays, men and women came together during “parades,” where they socialized, flirted, and sometimes cozied up to one another. She also shows how these otherwise festive occasions sometimes culminated in violence; jealous paramours “engaged in fist or knife fights over the women, and the women fought with each other if a male inmate selected wrongly” (252).

By examining the discord that sometimes erupted among competing suitors and their dames, Miller illustrates the complexity of human relationships and gives readers access to the interior (and intimate) world of male and female captives. She also shows how capricious the southern penal franchise was: what was true of women prisoners’ experiences in Florida was not true in the neighboring state of Georgia, for example.

Miller’s attention to gender extends to her treatment of the subjects of health, disability, and the medical world of Florida’s prison system, where female trusties served as nurses and orderlies for sick men and women but also attended to the welfare of pregnant and postnatal patients. While health as a category of analysis is still inching...