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  • Carceral Lives Matter
  • Jeannine Marie DeLombard (bio)
Jen Manion. Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $45.00.
Austin Reed. The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict. Ed. Caleb Smith. New York: Random House, 2016. Figures, appendices, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $18.00 (paper).

Ava DuVernay’s 2016 Netflix documentary 13th, on the U.S. criminal justice system in the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, is only the most recent example of the intensifying critical scrutiny of race and penality in both mainstream news sources and alternative media. In 2010, civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The 2012 New York Times bestseller recounts how the Reagan-era War on Drugs has gradually been institutionalized into “a new system of racialized social control.”1 The New Jim Crow may well have inspired black millennials to break ranks with their elders, as evidenced by protests holding 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton answerable for the devastating impact on communities of color of President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. (Both Clintons have issued apologies.) These protests attracted national attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, founded in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin. As the news of Zimmerman’s acquittal spread in the summer of 2013, U.S. movie theaters were screening Fruitvale Station (2013). The Sundance- and Cannes Award-winning film opens and closes with smartphone footage of the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant—also unarmed, also African American—by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer. Over the next three years, the tragic scene would be restaged over and over again in a seemingly endless string of viral videos documenting brutal police attacks on Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and other black and brown citizens. Noting the widespread tendency to focus on male victims of racial profiling, the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) [End Page 33] launched the #SayHerName campaign in February 2015 to promote intersectional social justice by exposing violence by officials against women of color.

With all of these events unfolding under what sociologist and minister Michael Eric Dyson in a new book calls The Black Presidency (2016), African American cultural criticism has again become mainstream. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me (2015), won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for General Non-Fiction. As the examples of Dyson and the AAPF suggest, those in the academy have not confined their voices to classrooms and peer-reviewed publications; with Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (2016), Princeton Department of Religion Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., may represent a new cohort of post-Ferguson black public intellectuals.

As Liberty’s Prisoners and The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict remind us, however, incarceration as racialized social control has been constitutive of American politics and culture from the very beginning. Aptly, Jen Manion locates her study of early American carceral culture in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Manion’s welcome contribution is an intersectional analysis that considers the interplay of race, condition, class, gender, national origin, and sexuality in the development of the penitentiary system. In the process, however, she covers ground that has already been well trodden by prison historians David Rothman, Billy G. Smith, Thomas Dumm, Michael Meranze, Rebecca McLennan, Leslie Patrick-Stamp, Jack D. Marrietta and G. S. Rowe, as well as literary scholars like Peter Okun, Jodi Schorb, Caleb Smith, and myself. As the familiar images adorning and illustrating the book indicate, Liberty’s Prisoners once again takes us from Walnut Street Gaol (1776) and Walnut Street Prison (1790), to Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) and Philadelphia’s House of Refuge (1828).

U.S. prison history is typically structured by the tandem development of Pennsylvania’s “separate system” of solitary confinement at Eastern State and New York’s “congregate” system of silent group incarceration. Appropriately, then, Caleb Smith provides an insider view of the alternate “congregate” worlds...

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