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Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South. By Alex Lichtenstein. (New York: Verso, 1996. xx, 264 pp. Cloth, $64.95, ISBN 1-85984-991-1. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 1-85984-086-8.)
One Dies, Get Another. Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928. By Matthew J. Mancini. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. xiv, 283 pp. $34.95, ISBN 1-57003-083-9.)
"Worse than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. By David M. Oshinsky. (New York: Free Press, 1996. xiv, 306 pp. $25.00, ISBN 0-684-82298-9.)
The topic of convict labor in the American South has long been one of intense interest to academicians and social reformers. George Washington Cable, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Robert Elliott Burns, and Frank Tannenbaum have all made memorable statements on the subject, not to mention those of C. Vann Woodward and W. J. Cash. The three works under review here-all solid contributions to the growing literature on the subject-further illuminate a topic with undeniable parallels to presentday penology and race relations.
Scholars will likely take the most issue with Alex Lichtenstein's work, largely because it is by design the most provocative of the three books and because of the author's Marxist approach. Even if one does not agree with all of the particulars of Lichtenstein's argument, there can be little doubt that he has produced a powerful interpretation that will have to be reckoned with by all serious students of the New South.
Lichtenstein's study concentrates on Georgia, with only brief excursions to the coal mines of east Tennessee and north Alabama and the roads of North Carolina. The book is not a social history, and its author purposely avoids getting bogged down in the intrinsic brutality of his subject matter. Instead, Lichtenstein concentrates on questions of political economy and race. He argues that private convict leasing, and later the public chain gang, served as hybrid forms of labor for a region that was in the throes of capitalist transition from a slavebased agricultural economy to a free-labor industrial economy. The use of convict labor did not represent an aberration in "an otherwise slow but healthy march toward progress," Lichtenstein asserts, but was itself an inherent and integral part of southern progress and modernization. Hence the author's...