Doing Time in the Depression

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world—overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis.Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California’s penal systems. Each element of prison life—from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence—demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.

Timely and required reading for all interested in the history of Californias criminal justice system., Doing Time in the Depression compellingly connects prisoners to the social, political, and economic turmoil of the 1930s., This reviewer is very happy to see this very much needed and important book on an earlier time of incarceration in the U.S., especially with all the discussion today about mass incarceration., Ethan Blue's brilliant, original study of the last time doing time was so extraordinarily ordinary reveals how distinctive 1930s prison regimes converged in a singular achievement. They renovated racism, inequality, and vulnerability to premature death for the purpose of producing public revenues and legitimacy, at the expense of modestly educated people in the prime of life. Doing Time in the Depression is required reading for all who focus their energies on today's mass incarceration and other forms of dispossession., Ethan Blue demonstrates that these present problems originate in a troubled past. Long histories of conquest, colonialism, enslavement and exploitation produced the patterns that pervade prison systems past and present. Court decisions and punitive practices that rendered people convicted of crimes as civilly dead in the nineteenth century provided the inner logic for a legal system that criminalized the survival strategies of oppressed people, protecting the propertied classes but in the process producing the very forms of non-normative behavior that the prison system purported to prevent. The prison system has functioned historically as a way of controlling and exploiting surplus labor. Yet all social structures ultimately revolve around human agency. Blues sophisticated research design and his extensive empirical research enable him to explore in this book the world that the prisoners made despite the many things they could not control. He shows that the history of macrococial practices and institutions encompass micropolitics of oppression and opposition. Blue argues that inmate investments in particular understandings of masculinity tragically enabled prison administrators to foment a radical divisiveness across racial lines that impeded chances for class solidarity.

Ethan Blue is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Australia.