This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our supporters at patreon.com and by University of

North Carolina Press, which has loads of great titles, perfect for dig listeners like you.

One that you might like is, We Are Not Slaves, State Violence, Coerced labor, and prisoners' rights in post-war America,

by Robert T. Chase. In the early 20th century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national

scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions, while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave

plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s, when, led by Texas, southern states adopted

northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined.

Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence

more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power

to accelerate state-orchestrated

brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse. Now it was up to

the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Robert T. Chase narrates the

struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the

constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano movement and black power organizations

publicized their deplorable conditions as slaves of the state and initiated a prison-made

civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epical legal victories

that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual,

but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system

and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers.

Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold,

but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics

in the United States, as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past

...