Robert T. Chase
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781469653570
- eISBN:
- 9781469653594
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469653570.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
Chapter 3 moves from the field to the prison building to reveal how hierarchical prisoner labor arrangements structured an internal prison economy that bought and sold prisoner bodies and services as ...
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Chapter 3 moves from the field to the prison building to reveal how hierarchical prisoner labor arrangements structured an internal prison economy that bought and sold prisoner bodies and services as cell slavery. By narrating southern prisons’ shift from dormitories to cells, this chapter will show how the power and control of prisoner trustees was strengthened by the changes. Within the southern convict guard framework, prison rape is analyzed as a state-orchestrated design rather than as an individual act pf prisoner pathology. Through an analysis of sexual violence in male prisons as a social construct of the southern trustee system, this chapter joins in a historical turn toward placing sexual violence at the very center of racial oppression. Seeking to take prison rape seriously as evidence of evolving state control and orchestration, the chapter pushes against the criminological view that has cast prison rape as a timeless function of the prisoners’ own pathology. The chapter also considers how women prisoners experienced the southern trusty system and the state’s attempt to isolate and target women that the prison classified as the “aggressive female homosexual.”Less
Chapter 3 moves from the field to the prison building to reveal how hierarchical prisoner labor arrangements structured an internal prison economy that bought and sold prisoner bodies and services as cell slavery. By narrating southern prisons’ shift from dormitories to cells, this chapter will show how the power and control of prisoner trustees was strengthened by the changes. Within the southern convict guard framework, prison rape is analyzed as a state-orchestrated design rather than as an individual act pf prisoner pathology. Through an analysis of sexual violence in male prisons as a social construct of the southern trustee system, this chapter joins in a historical turn toward placing sexual violence at the very center of racial oppression. Seeking to take prison rape seriously as evidence of evolving state control and orchestration, the chapter pushes against the criminological view that has cast prison rape as a timeless function of the prisoners’ own pathology. The chapter also considers how women prisoners experienced the southern trusty system and the state’s attempt to isolate and target women that the prison classified as the “aggressive female homosexual.”
