Capital and Convict: Race, Region, and Punishment in Post–Civil War America by Henry Kamerling (review)

In 1866, South Carolina governor James Orr argued for overhauling the state's penal system. With those held therein "exempt from all labor," he claimed, they remained "vicious, depraved non-producers" (28). While Orr complained specifically about the treatment of freedmen newly under the state's authority, his sentiments encapsulated national theories regarding the intersection of incarceration, work, and character. In Capital and Convict, a comparative study of the penal systems South Carolina and Illinois developed between 1865 and 1886, Henry Kamerling probes the nexus between understandings of convicts' depravity, labor's reformative power, and capitalism's emerging hegemony. Rather than producing fundamentally different punitive regimes (as studies of Gilded Age incarceration often suggest), the North and South saw strikingly similar ones evolve; despite different racial ideologies, capitalism's overarching effects and prisoners' resistance produced penal systems divergent in details but similar in essentials.

In the wake of the Civil War, South Carolina and Illinois reckoned with escalating numbers of convicts, which taxed the states' governments and thus their citizenry. Each erected penitentiaries and strove to make the incarcerated offset the expenses they incurred via various forms of contract labor. Beyond seeking to make prisons pay, however, both states responded to a growing impulse to reform inmates. In Illinois, authorities heeded reformers' calls to see their charges as individuals who had deviated from society's norms but were capable of repenting and rejoining that same society. To speed this process, they advocated religious instruction, education, and a vigorous regimen of refining labor (and if the state profited, all the better). With Radical Reconstruction empowering South Carolina's politically engaged black majority, for a decade that state pursued a similar course and rejected irreconcilable whites' attempts to install a racialized justice system. While the state experimented with convict labor, it rebuffed the practice of leasing convicts to private employers, which all other Southern states deployed. Conceiving of convicts as exiled members of society to be redeemed and reintegrated, South Carolina's and Illinois's prisons largely converged in the decade following the Civil War.

When Reconstruction's end evicted black South Carolinians from power, the state immediately aligned punitively with the rest of the South; indeed, one of Governor Wade Hampton's first actions was to legalize convict leasing. From then on, the state increasingly criminalized its black population, rejecting the premise that it could be integrated into civic and political life. South Carolina collectively and publicly punished African Americans, driving them beyond the civic and political pale white Carolinians constructed. While this racialized penal system differed from that in Illinois (which continued pursuing rehabilitative measures), Kamerling suggests that the similarities remained yet more salient thanks to Gilded Age capitalism's demands. Illinois's system sought to bend prisoners to the structures of industrial life—to remove recalcitrance, install bourgeois morality, and develop the labor discipline necessary for life as wage-workers. South Carolina's efforts similarly conformed convicts to the state's particular expression of capitalism, which prized cheap, submissive black labor above all else.

South Carolina's and Illinois's penal systems converged yet further through their failures. Those incarcerated in each state vigorously resisted being molded to fit capitalism's requirements. They saw themselves not as deviants but as victims of systemic injustices. Secure in their innocence, they fought against having their minds, souls, and bodies bent to the nascent economic order. In the face of continuous, stubborn resistance, guards and wardens disregarded high-minded reforms for force. Brutality and repression instigated cycles of resistance and violence. Contestation, then, made the lived realities of both penal systems fundamentally similar; incarceration could well be worse in an Illinois penitentiary than in a South Carolina convict camp, with differences stemming less from region than the whims of penal authorities.

Kamerling deftly deploys the relatively limited available sources to indicate similarities in carceral life across the late-nineteenth-century...