Doing Time in the Depression (Hardcover)

Ethan Blue

ISBN 10: 0814709400 / ISBN 13: 9780814709405

Published by New York University Press, New York, 2012

About this Item

Hardcover. 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 worldoverwhelmingly 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 lifefrom numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violencedemonstrated 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. Argues that the prison systems of California and Texas during the Depression set the tone for the identity roles of the 30s Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9780814709405

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Doing Time in the Depression (Hardcover)
• Publisher: New York University Press, New York
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814709400
• ISBN 13: 9780814709405
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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