Mapping the History of the Carceral State from Jim Crow to Sun Belt: A Review Essay

I nfluenced by the framing of contemporary mass incarcerationas the "New Jim Crow," these two collections both seek to complicate popular narratives positing a "direct trajectory from slavery to Jim Crow to modern-day criminal justice practices without recognizing the ebbs and flows of historical change" (Wood and Ring, p. 3). ¹The two collections approach this goal in different ways, despite including some of the same contributors, a shared vocabulary, and a common set of textual influences. Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring's Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow Southbrings together a group of detailed case studies of local law enforcement and penal practices in specific southern locales with an emphasis on "rigid black/white hierarchy" (Wood and Ring, p. 10). Robert T. Chase's Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations, Immigration Detentions, and Resistanceopens with the historical image of the "lawman" of the "Old West" and draws broad connections throughout the Sun Belt to identify a "carceral network" linking colonial imprisonment of Indigenous people and immigrant detention and deportation to the intersecting histories of criminal targeting of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx populations in the South and West (Chase, p. 1).

Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow Southfits the parameters of southern history as it is generally understood in the more conventional sense. The editors argue that despite the haunting past of slavery and Jim Crow, scholarship on the origins of the contemporary carceral state has "relegated southern penal practices to the margins of the story" and "avoids issues of regionalism" (Wood and Ring, pp. 3, 12 n10). The introduction's claim about the lack of regional focus in scholarship is belied by major regional studies of prisons and policing in California, Chicago, and New York, as well as by significant and influential histories of prisons in the South such as David M. Oshinsky's now classic " Worse Than Slavery," Alex Lichtenstein's Twice the Work of Free Labor, Robert Perkinson's Texas Tough, and two recent prizewinning books on incarcerated Black women in Georgia, Sarah Haley's No Mercy Hereand Talitha L. LeFlouria's Chained in Silence. ²Even if this opening claim is something of an overstatement, the editors are not wrong to note that the South's role in the national history of crime and punishment has been more often alluded to than studied. The essays in Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow Souththus make a valuable contribution to southern history by emphasizing the specifics of southern law enforcement and prison practices in the Jim Crow era, adding more complex and local understandings to the national history of criminal justice.

Focusing on crime, policing, and penal institutions from the 1890s to the 1950s, nine local case studies in Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow Southchallenge previous assumptions or general understandings of southern law enforcement history. For example, K. Stephen Prince's analysis of the 1906 murder trial of New Orleans Black policeman George Doyle illuminates a previously mostly unknown history of Black police in the transition from Reconstruction to Jim Crow governments. Tammy Ingram's analysis of the decriminalization of white people in the organized crime enclave of Phenix City, Alabama, presents a contrasting image to the better-known analysis of the criminalization of African Americans as central to the maintenance of Jim Crow. Amy Louise Wood's sharp analysis of South Carolina governor Cole Blease's use of pardons provides another provocative and counterintuitive...