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The chapter reveals how cultural connections to Mexico and a shared Mexican heritage allowed Mexican American prisoners survive the isolation and quotidian colonization of Mexican people within the confines of Southwestern prison farms during the Great Depression. The chapter explores how Mexican American prisoners on the U.S. side of the border relied on cultural persistence and survivals to reshape Texas prison farms into spaces of cultural continuity. By taking readers inside the confines of Texas’s only all-Mexican prison, the Blue Ridge State Farm, known as “Little Mexico,” the chapter reveals how language, song, sport, food, religious practices, and a Spanish-language prison newspaper sustained a “hidden script” and practices of everyday resistance that fashioned what the chapter calls a “colonia within the carceral state.”

This chapter describes the braided overt and covert economies of cash, favors, contraband, sex, and sexual violence through which Texas and California institutions functioned. Select prisoners played lynchpin roles in each state. In Texas, building tenders (prisoners appointed by guards to keep order in the dormitories where inmates slept) were the key figures, but in California, prisoners called “con bosses” were the most important. As the heads of prison departments and managers of productive processes, con bosses cultivated political and economic relationships to their personal advantage, often to the detriment of other prisoners. Building tenders and con bosses linked the official productive forces of the prisons to their informal economies, where markets of economic, sexual, violent, symbolic, and bureaucratic capital combined in dense networks of authority. Each of these systems undermined the possibilities of inmate solidarity, as prisoners frequently found themselves pitted against one another, rather than against the keepers of their institutions. To this end, the building tender and con boss systems undermined the “con ethic” that midcentury sociologists identified and romanticized, which suggested that prisoners supported each other against their keepers.

This chapter focuses on death and dying in Texas and California prisons in the 1930s. Mortality rates in Texas generally declined during the period, even as the prison population grew in total numbers. This probably reflected the centralization of the medical system at Texas prisons. In the same years California's mortality rate was broadly stable, and generally lower than Texas'. Nonetheless, mortality rates in California and Texas penitentiaries were significantly higher than rates for the general populations of their respective states and of the nation overall. This was true despite the fact that the prisons consisted overwhelmingly of young men, who, given their youth, would presumably not die in large numbers. Racism differentiated and allocated life chances. Data is unavailable from California, but evidence from Texas confirms that black prisoners died at higher rates than Mexican or white prisoners.

This chapter discusses labor in Texas prisons in the 1930s. Since the prison was situated on over seventy thousand acres of fertile agricultural land, labor assignments were geared toward self-sustaining agricultural production and minimizing costs. State prisons claimed increased efficiencies over the Depression decade. Although economies of scale may have played a role as the prison population increased, the more effective systemic exploitation of prisoners' labor was a more likely foundation of those savings. Farm labor needs and racial hierarchies trumped penological or rehabilitative priorities. Seasonal agricultural cycles and markets also set the pace of life and the distribution of labor in Texas prisons, with select white prisoners given privileged industrial jobs.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book tells the story of the Great Depression from the state prisons of Texas and California, where the misery of the crisis was indeed multiplied. Texas and California were states on the border of the nation, which saw dynamic population growth in short periods of time. They were also states where people who traveled diverse paths met, lived, loved, and fought. The argument in the subsequent chapters operates at two levels. The first level posits that criminal justice functioned to control large numbers of multiracial working classes in Texas and California, and predominantly working-class men, in a period of widespread economic crisis. The second level of analysis argues that state punishment sustained a racially divided, masculinist, working-class population, and that the social forces prisons generated undermined the promise of radical working-class movements.

This chapter discusses the impact of World War II on Texas and California prisons. In California, its massively overcrowded institutions grew quieter as prisoners ensnared by the Depression were paroled or finished their sentences, and as numbers of new inmates decreased. Good jobs in war industries and the demand for soldiers across the armed forces drained the pool of potential inmates. Not only were there fewer state prisoners during World War II, but labor assignments diversified. Work proved to be a key source of prisoners' identification as patriotic Americans. In Texas, wartime prison populations fell as they did in California. But by every account, conditions in Texas prisons changed for the worse. Perhaps this occurred because the prison's agricultural production had expanded so greatly during the Depression that the prison system itself, like the economy of the previous decade, had reached a crisis of overproduction. There were too few inmates to make the farms run, too few inmates to be contained efficiently, too few laborers for the prison to operate as smoothly as it once had. The remainder of the chapter covers the postwar Texas and California prison systems.