Title: Crime and punishment in the Jim Crow South /
Authors: Wood, Amy Louise, 1967-; Ring, Natalie J.
Year: 2019
Subjects: Discrimination in criminal justice administration Southern States History; African Americans Social conditions; African Americans Southern States History; African Americans.; African Americans Social conditions.; Discrimination in criminal justice administration; Race relations; United States Race relations History; Southern States; United States
Abstract: "In recent years, there has been renewed attention to problems pervading the criminal justice system in the United States. The prison population has grown exponentially since 1970 due to the war on drugs, minimum sentencing laws, and other crime control measures instituted in the 1980s and 1990s. The U.S. now incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world, over 2 million in 2016. African Americans constitute nearly half of those prisoners. This volume contributes to current debates on the criminal justice system by filling a crucial gap in scholarship with ten original essays by both established and up-and-coming historians on the topics of crime and state punishment in the Jim Crow era. In particular, these essays address the relationship between the modern state, crime control, and white supremacy. Essays in the collection show that the development of the modern penal system was part and parcel of Jim Crow, and so are the racial injustices endemic to it. The essays that Wood and Ring have curated enrich our understanding of how the penal system impacted the New South; demonstrate the centrality of the carceral regime in producing racial, gender, and legal categories in the New South; provide insightful analysis of intellectual work around the U.S. prison regime; use the penal system to make a case for Southern exceptionalism; and extend conversations about the penal system's restriction of African American political and civil rights. As a whole, the volume provides a nuanced portrait of the dynamic between state power and white supremacy in the South beyond a story of top-down social control"--
Contents: The trials of George Doyle: race and policing in Jim Crow New Orleans / K. Stephen Prince -- "Many people 'colored' have come to the homicide office": police investigations of African American homicides in Memphis, 1920-1945 / Brandon T. Jett -- Forced confessions: police torture and the African American struggle for civil rights in the 1930s and 1940s South / Silvan Niedermeier -- The South's Sin City: white crime and the limits of law and order in Phenix City, Alabama / Tammy Ingram -- Testimonial incapacity and criminal defendants in the South / Pippa Holloway -- Sewing and spinning for the state: incarcerated black female garment workers in the Jim Crow South / Talitha L. LeFlouria -- Cole Blease's pardoning pen: state power and penal reform in South Carolina / Amy Louise Wood -- Hanging, the electric chair, and death penalty reform in the early twentieth-century South / Vivien Miller -- The making of the modern death penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina / Seth Kotch.