Doing time in the Depression : everyday life in Texas and California prisons / Ethan Blue.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blue, Ethan.

Series:

American history and culture.

American history and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prisoners--California--History.

Prisoners.

Prisons--California--Social conditions.

Prisons.

Prison administration--California--History.

Prison administration.

Prisoners--Texas--History.

Prisons--Texas--Social conditions.

Prison administration--Texas--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, c2012.

New York, NY : New York University Press, [2012]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930's as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world—overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California’s penal systems. Each element of prison life—from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence—demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930's, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.

Contents:

Of bodies and borders : the demography of incarceration

Work in the walled city : labor and discipline in California's prisons

From can see to can't : agricultural labor and industrial reform on Texas penal plantations

Shifting markets of power : building tenders, con bosses, queens, and guards

Thirty minutes behind the walls : prison radio and the popular culture of punishment

Sport and celebration in the popular culture of punishment

A dark cloud would go over : death and dying

Going home.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Mrz 2024)

ISBN:

9780814723166

0814723160

OCLC:

775685221

Access Restriction:

Open access Unrestricted online access