University of Texas Arlington: We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (GMT-5)
November 10, 2022
12:30 PM - 3:30 PM
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In the mid-twentieth century U.S. South and Southwest, prisons operated a highly efficient and lucrative prison labor system that controlled, disciplined, and ordered prisoners through racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies. This talk argues that the social structure of prison labor in the American South, particularly Texas, disciplined prisoners through a state orchestrated Jim Crow system of double enslavement—a slave for the state in prison fields and an enslaved body and servant within prison cells. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners and oral histories conducted with prisoners, this talk narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement that directly confronted the carceral state and mass incarceration.
Date posted
Mar 31, 2022
Date updated
Mar 31, 2022