Robert Chase’s We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America provides the most thorough and sophisticated look at the Texas prison system of the twentieth century. Chase blends legal and social history, together with sociology and ethnic and gender studies, to place incarcerated people at the center of the tremendous, if bleak, transformations of the state’s prisons from plantation barbarism to high-tech isolation. Chase makes great use of the dozens of oral histories he completed with key but unheralded participants, as well as his expert readings of a bevy of lawsuits and shifts in the structure of confinement. From sexual violence and coerced labor to worker’s strikes and lawsuits, from the “massive resistance” authorities displayed to respecting the human rights of incarcerated people to the internecine violence among prisoners, We Are Not Slaves chronicles the daily rhythms of this carceral capitol with chilling insight.
This deep dive into the Lone Star carceral regime is a welcome corrective to the narrative of the “Texas miracle,” which sees the state’s propensity for spending less per incarcerated person than other states as a model to emulate. Instead, We Are Not Slaves demonstrates that the ostensible frugality of Texas has always been premised on brutality. The “building tender” system, which allowed the state to hire fewer prison guards than other states by equipping select (and typically white) prisoners to function as guards, pimps, and executioners, joined with the widespread coerced agricultural labor that Black, Latinx, and white prisoners were forced to do. Both anchored the Texas prison system in the state, and regional, history of slavery. Indeed, Chase writes, Texas was the vanguard of a “‘Sunbelt’ militarized carceral state approach that became exemplary of national prison trends” (7) and his book offers “a study of how regional difference in time and space shaped a variety of different carceral states and resistance against it” (18).