From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20086763 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Constante González Groba (0000-0002-0556-8362, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Pages | 77-110 |
| Publication date | 2023-03-28 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Pathologizing Black Bodies (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.4324/9781003355557-6 |
| OpenAlex | W4361188714 |
| ISBN | 9781003355557 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
In this chapter I look at the US prison system as a racialized topography genealogically linked to slavery and survey the history of the racist association of the black body with criminality itself. I analyze two recent novels that directly confront the US prison system and its effective continuation of slavery by another name. Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), partly inspired by the historian David Oshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, looks back to the history of Parchman Farm, the Mississippi prison that for many years functioned as a slave plantation and was an extension of the plantation slave economy. Ward communicates the unspeakable past of this prison plantation through the ghost of a former black inmate who initiates the present-day teenage protagonist into the tragic history of his family and his race. Another attempt to combat historical amnesia is Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), which gives fictional voice to the black inmates of one of the “pain factories,” a reform school in Florida, closed in 2011, that had been racially segregated until 1968. The “kind of Nickel deadness” in the eyes of the student prisoners reads as an obvious nod to Patterson’s “social death,” which was characteristic of plantation slavery. Also described is convict labor, a practice characteristic of the US prison system, for which the boys receive no compensation. In effect, these boys are civilly dead “neoslaves” in an institution which, with its fields and workshops and in the implementation of all kinds of torture including solitary confinement, seems like a prison plantation
Criminology · Political science · Prison · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Race, History, and American Society
| Citations per year | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |