Book Review

Martha Myers writes in a long and venerable tradition of criminological sociology that attempts to link social change with transformations in punishment, exemplified best perhaps by Rusche and Kircheimer's classic 1939 Marxist text (cited early on by Myers), Punishment and Social Structure. Her book, Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, takes as its subject the dramatic changes in punishment in Georgia from the era of Reconstruction until World War II. She examines penal practices as the state shifted from private leasing of convicts to publicly controlled county chain gangs. Using state prison records, she also measures changing rates of penitentiary admissions, the severity of sentences, and release rates for blacks and whites. Generally she argues that models of southern penality must account for a "dual punishment system" (40), since the factors affecting white and black incarceration proved quite distinct, not surprising in a Jim Crow society. In particular, her analysis suggests that the punishment of blacks proved far more sensitive to swings in the economy.	1
Myers draws heavily, but by no means exclusively, on criminology "grounded firmly in the political economy perspective" (6) pioneered by Rusche and Kircheimer and correctly notes that the private leasing of convicts should be understood as reflective of "distinctive features of the southern political economy" (6). For example, the convict lease emerged as the New South's solution to new social control problems faced by fiscally strapped southern states and industrialists' hunger for cheap, reliable labor. The advent of the chain gang deployed penal labor during the progressive era to improve the state's underdeveloped roads. This will come as little surprise to southern historians, who can rely upon the detailed studies of Edward Ayers, Matt Mancini, Karin Shapiro, and myself that argue much the same thing.	2
The book has both the strengths and weaknesses of a resolutely quantitative sociological approach, using data to test a model of punishment rather than to explore historical development in narrative form. On the one hand, by separating her narrative history of the Georgia penal system from her analysis, Myers undercuts her own effort to document complexities of social change over time. But what Myers does add is the sociologist's ability to use painstakingly gathered penal data to make more exact correlations between swings in the business cycle—and, in particular, fluctuations in the price of cotton—and penal innovations, racial disparities in punishment, and forms of conditional release like parole. The discussion of the latter is especially welcome, as few southern historians have given parole the attention it deserves. Moreover, Myers looks not only at the form of punishment, but at its severity as well, at least as that can be measured by sentence length: here she finds little change over time.	3
Still, multivariate analysis and correlation do not translate into convincing historical explanations. For instance, it is surprising to learn that black imprisonment declined in response to economic crises but black imprisonment for property crimes increased in response to lowering prices of cotton, a puzzling anomaly left unexplained by Myers. Moreover, wedded as she is to testable hypotheses and the search for a "general theory of punishment" (264), Myers frequently insists that a particular factor "should" result in increased imprisonment, only to conclude that it "unexpectedly" did not, again without venturing a guess as to why this was so. Finally, explanation often finds itself corralled by the chosen variables. She separates her crime variables into the overly broad categories of "violent" and "property," thus potentially obscuring important social and racial conflicts centering on more specific offenses, such as rape or larceny after trust (breaking contract). Similarly, all the qualitative evidence left unexamined by Myers clearly indicates that punishment of violent offenses by African Americans varied considerably according to the race of the victim, but Myers does not consider this in her quantitative analysis and thus misses a crucial determinant in southern sentencing. And while she calls attention to the importance of parole, she does little to demonstrate its significant role in labor discipline at a moment when white landowners feared an exodus of black labor. Indeed, her model hypothesizes that a labor shortage in agriculture "should" inhibit parole, ignoring the fact that parolees made exceptionally docile field hands. Perhaps at a certain point an analysis burdened by so many cross-correlated variables—race, offense, political economy, policy changes, urbanization, racial inequality, the price of cotton, and World War I—will defy explanation altogether.	4
The sociological method also yields some misleading assertions. For example, while Myers is correct to suggest that in the late nineteenth century many of Georgia's black convicts came from the cotton belt, it is not true that the state's growing cities left no "imprint on the population of convicts leased to private entrepreneurs"(2). In fact, even during the waning years of Reconstruction, many leased black convicts had been recent rural migrants to Atlanta, Macon, or Augusta. And while the black proportion of Georgia's urban population shrunk relative to whites between 1900 and 1940, this did not mean that "the black urban population ... declined sharply" (240). Similarly, while Georgia's penal system continued to target blacks after the abolition of leasing, it was hardly the case that by 1940 "the convict population had changed little" (3); by that date, whites constituted a third of the state's convicts, whereas when leasing was abolished in 1908 they had been a mere tenth. Even in the realm of political economy Myers makes some curious claims: the depression of 1893-94 did weaken the lease, but more in response to the lessees' discovery of the costs of superfluous convict labor than to a fiscal crisis of the state, as Myers claims.	5
Overall, this work suggests the empirical impoverishment and limited utility quantitative sociology has for historians when not supplemented by detailed archival evidence, no matter how sophisticated its approach or how well-collected its numerical series of data. One figure stands out though: appalling as it was, Georgia's penal system remained a relatively small gun in the arsenal of social and racial control, especially compared to today's carceral state. Even at its peak, the black incarceration rate in Georgia during the period considered by Myers reached 220 per 100,000; in 1998 the rate for all races in Georgia stood at 492 per 100,000 and was certainly twice that for the state's African Americans. There's progress for you!	6
Alex Lichtenstein Florida International University

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