Book Review

Vivien Miller's Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency examines the workings of Florida's clemency review process from 1889, when responsibility for oversight of state convicts was shifted from the adjutant general to the newly appointed commissioner of agriculture, to 1918, immediately prior to the dissolution of the notorious contract lease system to which felons had traditionally been sentenced. This was a dynamic period in Florida history, distinguished by rapid population growth and migration, urbanization, industrialization, and, according to Miller, a "civilizing process" of the sort most readily identified with the work of Norbert Elias. Paying particular attention to the interplay of sex, race, class, and power, and how each affected and was affected by prevailing socioeconomic conditions, she frames her study--a revision of her 1998 Open University doctoral dissertation--around two key questions: first, "what decisions were taken to execute or commute the sentences of those convicted of interpersonal violence in Florida" during this period; and, second, "what do pardon applications, their form, language, and rhetorical construction," tell us about the society that produced them? (5). To answer them, Miller draws on an impressive range of primary sources, including pardon application registers, reports, and related correspondence, as well as prison registers, clemency decrees, newspaper reports, and court records, that shed much-needed light on the functioning of post-sentencing criminal justice in a New South state.	1
In the absence of an established network of penitentiaries, Florida's convicted felons were routinely assigned to work in one of numerous privately-run camps, most laboring in the state's major extractive industries, coal and phosphate mining and naval stores production. All told, over 11,000 people--predominantly young, working-class, black men--were employed in the contract labor system during this thirty year period. Life on the lease was exceedingly harsh, and those consigned to it were naturally eager to avail themselves of executive clemency, one of the few means by which prisoners could secure an early release in the years prior to the institution of probation and parole. It was left to convicts and their advocates to craft petitions that would satisfy the expectations of a five-member pardon board dominated by propertied and professional white men whose perceptual universe was likely incongruous with that of the diverse cohort that was seeking their mercy. Over time, a series of standard narratives evolved reflecting the biases and predilections of their intended audience. Successful applications typically required that a petitioner's actions be portrayed in a manner that emphasized his or her fidelity to the entrenched southern values of honor and respectability, both preeminent considerations in what remained a fundamentally patriarchal and hierarchal society deeply imbued with white supremacist ideology.	2
Miller concludes that Florida's clemency review process was marked by paradox. Whereas the power to pardon existed in part to introduce a semblance of equity into a criminal justice system fraught with inequality, it also constituted an extension of the state's surveillance and disciplining capacities. Similarly paradoxical was the pardon board's pattern of holding African Americans to a lower standard of conduct than other petitioners, provided, of course, that their crimes were confined to their own communities, a phenomenon that the author interprets as a striking manifestation of some of the very prejudices that the system was purposed to ameliorate. Clemency review was in the end "an antiprogressive tactic that fashioned itself as a rationalizing and modernizing technique in the context of penal modernity" (263), an eventuality that was itself inhibited by a deeply entrenched countervailing social structure. Such change as occurred tended ultimately to reinforce the status quo, wherein the attributes of whiteness and masculinity were consistently privileged.	3
By excavating this previously unfamiliar facet of Florida's legal history, Miller has made an important contribution to the literature on crime and punishment in U.S. history. She is to be commended for resuscitating a body of woefully underutilized sources, notably pardon case files and their corresponding reports, which contain a wealth of information to be mined by future historians. Among the strongest chapter in the book addresses clemency review as it relates to homicide. Here, Miller skillfully conveys both the predictability and uncertainty of the process, setting forth some of the myriad claims articulated by the parties involved, be they convicts, their victims, families, friends, employers, wardens, attorneys, or members of the pardon board itself, while exposing its fundamentally performative character. This and other chapters raise a number of intriguing issues that merit further investigation, particularly with respect to the complex interpersonal relations that grew up around the state's diffuse penal system. For instance, in what ways was law used to regulate convicts' relationships with those in- and outside the camps? What strategies did prisoners pursue to overcome these efforts? How widespread was sexual violence among prisoners of both sexes and what role, if any, did it play in pardon decisions? These are just a few of the promising directions for additional research suggested by this study.	4
At the same time, the strength of Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency is unfortunately vitiated by a number of stylistic, conceptual, and analytic deficiencies. As an initial matter, the text is suffused with quotations from secondary sources, many rather lengthy, that quickly become so cumbersome and intrusive as to disrupt the flow of text and argument. This infelicitous practice extends from historiographical debates that might have been more usefully paraphrased and footnoted to undisputed facts that ordinarily require no citation at all. Relatedly, the author's habit of analogizing to works dealing with other times and places (primarily, though not exclusively, Victorian England) without considering their precise relevance to the present context--indeed, oftentimes failing even to note their geographical and temporal location--also undermines the effectiveness of the book. Equally problematic is the frequent invocation of Foucauldian concepts and methods, more often than not for the purpose of demonstrating their inapplicability to the problem at hand. While Miller's assessments of the pertinence of Foucault's work to her own are entirely reasonable, if unremarkable, one is left wondering why she affords such prominence to ideas that do little to support or complicate her own positions. As it stands, these references have an artificial and obligatory quality that detracts from the important history she seeks to recount. Finally, it bears mentioning that the use of the phrase "sexual violence" in the title is somewhat misleading, suggesting a more sustained focus on that topic than the book in fact provides. Although Miller does devote a chapter to sex crimes, that category of offenses by no means applies to all, or even most, of those whose petitions lie at the center of this work.	5
These concerns notwithstanding, Crime, Sexual Violence, and Clemency is a valuable study with which historians of crime and punishment, as well as those interested in issues of race and gender in the Progressive era, will want to contend.	6
Lisa Cardyn Yale University

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