| 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

Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency: Florida's Pardon Board and Penal System in the Progressive Era. By Vivien M. L. Miller. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xiv, 366 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8130-1808-0.)

Vivien M. L. Miller's study of the activities of Florida's Pardon Board during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that the quality of mercy can indeed be constrained. The board, members of the governor's cabinet who were successful southern gentlemen, granted or withheld mercy according to standards of respectability, which depended on the petitioner's class, race, and gender. Florida did not have a parole system until the 1940s and did not build a "state farm" until the early twentieth century. Convicts were sent to labor camps, where they processed turpentine, cut lumber, or mined phosphate under the notorious convict lease system. The pardon board considered requests for commutation of sentences when prisoners could bring new evidence in their cases, provide testimony of good behavior in the labor camp, or provide proof of diseases associated with hard work and poor food. Pardons were not common, ranging from under 5 percent of convicts to 12 percent after 1900, mostly because of the increased use of conditional pardons, an unsupervised parole. 1

Miller found that the Pardon Board's documents 2

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