Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama 1865-1900.

By Mary Ellen Curtin. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Pp. [xiv], 261. Paper, $19.50, ISBN 0-8139-1984-3; cloth, $59.50, ISBN 0-8139-1981-9.)

This excellent and important study of African American convict miners in late-nineteenth-century Alabama greatly enhances the growing collection of state studies on convict leasing and southern prisons. It also provides insightful analysis of the experiences of Alabama's state and county prisoners, the majority of whom were African American men who served out their sentences in prison mines. They lived in filthy, disease-ridden, and unsanitary conditions and labored in dangerous and unstable mines to enhance the profits of both the state and mining companies like the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. Women prisoners did not mine coal, but their domestic contribution to convict camps and the state prison was essential and valuable. From 1888 to 1928 coal companies achieved a complete monopoly of prison labor in Alabama, and prison labor for profit underpinned relations between the state government, the coal mining industry, and the penal system. But this study also underlines the contribution of the prison to the development of a new black working class. Alabama's segregated and overcrowded prison mines trained industrial workers. As in Georgia and Tennessee, leasing produced a cohort of highly trained and skilled black miners; indeed, nearly half of all Alabama's exprisoners remained miners after their release (p. 2).

In focusing on the experiences of black prisoners in Alabama from the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the twentieth century, Mary Ellen Curtin underlines the significance of emancipation and Reconstruction conflicts for understanding the origins of leasing in the state, and economic and political contexts to account for its longevity (the convict lease was abolished in Alabama in 1928). For example, in exploring black vulnerability to larceny laws and the criminalization of "deadfalling" (chap. 3), Curtin challenges conventional historical views on the "crime wave" (p. 43) of the 1870s and 1880s and contemporary assumptions regarding African American criminality. The "deadfalls" were informal markets or stores run and patronized by freedpeople that served as important expressions of black independence and economic freedom in a sharecropping economy. However, these predominately African American economic activities led to competition with white traders, merchants, and landlords. Thus the "crime wave" must be understood within the context of a post-Reconstruction crackdown on black economic freedom and political independence. It is also clear that a range of attitudes existed toward violence, the law, the courts, and punishment in African American communities, and these became even more complex at the end of the nineteenth century amid growing class divisions.

One of the strengths of this work is Curtin's evaluation of the ways in which African American convicts responded to forced prison mining and imprisonment in the state prison at Wetumpka. Women convicts resisted authority by complaining, being insolent, defying orders, refusing to wear prison clothes, and escaping. In addition to utilizing traditional methods of overt and covert resistance, black prisoners drew on their experiences as free persons. For example, the educational experiences of freedom meant literacy and letter writing formed an important part of black prisoners' world. The directness of language and the implicit sense of injustice and defense of rights in prisoners' verbal and written complaints counter the image of an illiterate and degraded mass. Further, prisoners exploited reforms enacted in 1883 and 1885 to gain early release. The "right to possess a time card" that showed expected date of release (p. 94) and prisoners' willingness to challenge discrepancies in dates provided an important weapon for prisoners to ensure their early and legal release. "Short-term pardons" (p. 23), letter-writing programs, family visits, and regular releases were important reforms achieved during Reginald H. Dawson's tenure as chief inspector of prisoners from 1883 to 1895. Dawson's character and reform efforts form a commanding presence in Curtin's study--perhaps unsurprisingly, given the importance of his diary as a source--but this study also has much of value to say about the making of a southern prison reformer and the obstacles to the realization of penal change in the New South.

VIVIEN MILLER
Middlesex University