Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons

8. Going Home

| 213 8 Going Home Say someday, someday, someday baby, I’ll be home. Someday you’ll see me around. . . . When I get lucky, I’ll be home some day. —Arthur “Ligntnin’” Sherrod, “Should A Been on the River in 1910”1 Doing time was hard, and getting out was hard, too. If prisoners hoped for an early release, they had a lot of work to do—bags to weave or cotton to pick, certainly, but also powerful friends to make, petitions to write, bureaucracies to navigate, and favors to ask. Through the 1930s, parole boards would gain increasing power over inmates’ lives. Their ability to fix a sentence or set a release date incorporated what had once been judicial sentencing power into their administrative positions. Inmates and their families needed to learn what worked, and what did not, to help get them home. Historian David Rothman argued that decisions about parole—who could leave the prison, when, and under what circumstances—were, at their core, “arbitrary and capricious.”2 His conclusion about the capriciousness of parole and release was a necessary correction to parole board officers’ oftstated but rarely validated belief that parole would gauge individual prisoners ’ redemption and eligibility for return to the outside world. Parole was less scientific than board members’ ideological proclamations claimed, but it was also more complex than Rothman suggested. One might productively argue that capriciousness itself was a chief political effect of imprisonment—that the Kafkaesque unpredictability of the way punishment worked was perhaps unintended, yet central to relationships between the so-called criminal classes and the modern state. But there was more than this. Local and extralocal patronage systems, political economic needs, institutional control, and tension between ideologies of vengeful punishment and performances of individual reform—all 214 | Going Home played a role. Leaving the prison, as much as entering it, showed different aspects of each state’s penal modernity and its reimposition of hierarchies. From an inmate’s petition for an early release to his or her time on parole and beyond, formal and informal mechanisms effectively deepened modes of difference and power. Despite increasing the bureaucratic formalism of penal modernity—more developed in California than in Texas—leaving the prison, and the question of whether one served a full sentence or received clemency, demonstrated how inmates navigated a gray zone between bureaucratic formalism and the long traditions of sovereign discretion and its selective dispensation of “mercy” through early release. Inmates faced benefits and dangers in each. An application might win an individual prisoner’s parole, but it often did so by solidifying social hierarchies of race, nation, and gender. If an inmate played into the prescribed roles and validated the established social order, he or she just might leave a bit early.3 Though they shared a great deal, there were differences between the states. Release procedures differed by region, a fact that Rothman left unexplored. Officials in California, an aesthetically modern and liberal penal state, tended to favor an extensive parole program. Along with many progressive penologists of the day, they were convinced that parole was a necessary component of incarceration and release. Parole board members believed that all inmates should be released on parole for at least a short period, to supervise their transition to life and wage labor outside. California inmates were automatically considered for parole at the end of their minimum term.4 Nevertheless , a fundamental component for determining eligibility for parole was the guarantee of outside work and a signed labor contract, still understood as the foundation of proper manly citizenship. In California, release decisions bespoke a bureaucratic capitalist modernity, an unsteady balance between the needs of running overcrowded institutions and the desire to control a surplus labor population in an economic crisis. In contrast, the assumption in Texas was that prisoners should serve their full sentences, unless significant extenuating circumstances surrounding the crime were discovered.5 Most Texas prisoners served their full terms. However , if they could demonstrate community support for their release, they might get out early. Yet “community support” did not mean just any set of advocates; it meant the support of elite white patrons. In Texas, personal connections and visible patronage went further in securing release than mere evidence of a job. Put another way, release decisions in Texas tended to be local affairs, driven by inmates’ location in the racial and class patronage networks of the Going Home | 215...