| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900. By Mary Ellen Curtin. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. xiv, 261 pp. Cloth, $59.50, ISBN 0-8139-1981-9. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-8139-1984-3.)

Mary Ellen Curtin joins a growing number of scholars who, over the last quarter century, have sought to understand the place of convict labor in the postbellum South. Historians such as Edward Ayers, Dan Carter, Alex Lichtenstein, Matthew Mancini, David Oshinsky, and Karin Shapiro have not only chronicled convict labor's many horrors but also examined the institution's corrosive impact on southern political life, its ambiguous effect on southern industrialization, its equivocal influence on organized labor, and its perversion of justice for primarily young black men. 1

Curtin's intensive examination of convict labor in Alabama covers some of the same turf. She argues that convict labor as a system emerged haltingly and that both parties bore responsibility for it. The origin of the convict lease lay most significantly in the enormous indebtedness of southern states following the Civil War, and the institution quickly shored up the public finances of southern states, both by bringing in substantial revenue and by obviating the need to rebuild crumbling penitentiaries or construct new prisons to accommodate the expanding population of mostly black inmates. Like other historians, she also documents the manifold ways in which the prisoners themselves shaped the operation of the lease system, through vigorous resistance or formal appeals to prison officials. . . .

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