Overview

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world—overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California’s penal systems. Each element of prison life—from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence—demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.

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9781479821358

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Reviews

"""Ethan Blue's fascinating new book, Doing Time in the Depression , illuminates the penological history of the New Deal Era, and charts the emergence of the modern carceral state. Blue's work makes a truly unique contribution to the internal history of prison discipline and prison culture. No other historian has taken readers as far behind the walls as he does."" -Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University ""Ethan Blue's brilliant, original study of the last time doing time was so extraordinarily ordinary reveals how distinctive 1930s prison regimes converged in a singular achievement. They renovated racism, inequality, and vulnerability to premature death for the purpose of producing public revenues and legitimacy, at the expense of modestly educated people in the prime of life. Doing Time in the Depression is required reading for all who focus their energies on today's mass incarceration and other forms of dispossession.""-Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California ""This reviewer is very happy to see this very much needed and important book on an earlier time of incarceration in the U.S., especially with all the discussion today about mass incarceration.""-E. Smith, CHOICE "" Doing Time in the Depression shines especially brightly...as Blue takes us inside the world of prison sports.""- Journal of American History "" Doing Time in the Depression compellingly connects prisoners to the social, political, and economic turmoil of the 1930s.""- American Historical Review"

Ethan Blue's fascinating new book, Doing Time in the Depression , illuminates the penological history of the New Deal Era, and charts the emergence of the modern carceral state. Blue's work makes a truly unique contribution to the internal history of prison discipline and prison culture. No other historian has taken readers as far behind the walls as he does. -Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University Ethan Blue's brilliant, original study of the last time doing time was so extraordinarily ordinary reveals how distinctive 1930s prison regimes converged in a singular achievement. They renovated racism, inequality, and vulnerability to premature death for the purpose of producing public revenues and legitimacy, at the expense of modestly educated people in the prime of life. Doing Time in the Depression is required reading for all who focus their energies on today's mass incarceration and other forms of dispossession. -Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California This reviewer is very happy to see this very much needed and important book on an earlier time of incarceration in the U.S., especially with all the discussion today about mass incarceration. -E. Smith, CHOICE Doing Time in the Depression shines especially brightly...as Blue takes us inside the world of prison sports. - Journal of American History Doing Time in the Depression compellingly connects prisoners to the social, political, and economic turmoil of the 1930s. - American Historical Review

Doing Time in the Depression compellingly connects prisoners to the social, political, and economic turmoil of the 1930s. - American Historical Review ,

""Ethan Blue's fascinating new book, Doing Time in the Depression , illuminates the penological history of the New Deal Era, and charts the emergence of the modern carceral state. Blue's work makes a truly unique contribution to the internal history of prison discipline and prison culture. No other historian has taken readers as far behind the walls as he does."" -Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University ""Ethan Blue's brilliant, original study of the last time doing time was so extraordinarily ordinary reveals how distinctive 1930s prison regimes converged in a singular achievement. They renovated racism, inequality, and vulnerability to premature death for the purpose of producing public revenues and legitimacy, at the expense of modestly educated people in the prime of life. Doing Time in the Depression is required reading for all who focus their energies on today's mass incarceration and other forms of dispossession.""-Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California ""This reviewer is very happy to see this very much needed and important book on an earlier time of incarceration in the U.S., especially with all the discussion today about mass incarceration.""-E. Smith, CHOICE "" Doing Time in the Depression shines especially brightly...as Blue takes us inside the world of prison sports.""- Journal of American History "" Doing Time in the Depression compellingly connects prisoners to the social, political, and economic turmoil of the 1930s.""- American Historical Review

Author Information

Ethan Blue is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Australia.

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