Over the past four decades, the United States has established a carceral state that rivals any other Western nation. In 2008, America's incarcerated population exceeded 2.3 million people at its peak. Although the nation experienced a sharp decline, confined populations are again rising despite various attempts at reform.1 Robert T. Chase's brilliant volume We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America offers an analysis of the evolution in Texas prison management and subsequent resistance and revolution within that system from the Cold War-era to the 1980s.
Chase's work is unique in that it places sexuality as the central lens for analysis. In Part 1, “A Biography of State Violence in Coerced Labor,” Chase examines the southern shift from dormitory-style penal farms to cellblock housing found in northern prisons (103). Reformers expected the cellblock-style housing, merged with the southern labor system of previous years,...
