Black Women and the Carceral State

Gabriel Winant discusses an unprecedented historical accounting of the system of carceral labor inflicted on black women. Talitha L. LeFlouria’s “Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South,” and Sarah Haley’s “No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity” both focus on Georgia, a state often seen as the central link in the Southern chain-gang system. No other state so embraced the modernization project of the “New South,” laying railroads, digging mines, clearing forests, and paving roads in a postbellum frenzy of development.