We Are Not Slaves

Robert T. Chase's We Are Not Slaves provides a vivid—indeed, haunting—portrayal of life behind bars in the Texas prison system in the years after World War II. Contrary to claims by the Texas Department of Corrections that the state's postwar prison system was a model of modernity, Chase shows it to be a particularly brutal model of what David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch call “race management”: a time-honored system of control predicated on racial segregation, white supremacy, and violence (David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of Difference, 2012, p. 6). In this system, prison officials pit prisoners against each other by giving some of them (people known as “building tenders”) guard-like powers, including weapons, disciplinary authority, and freedom of movement, which produced a tacitly state-sanctioned system of sexual violence among prisoners (p. 9). At the same time, prison officials forced racially segregated groups of

Criminology · Guard (computer science · Political science · Prison · Racism · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · White supremacy · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Race, History, and American Society