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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 NAACPACP 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

...