We are not slaves : state violence, coerced labor, and prisoners' rights in postwar America / Robert T. Chase.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 475-506) and index.

Fears of contagion, strategies of containment : pathologizing homosexuality, incarcerating bodies, and reshaping the southern prison farm -- A fine southern plantation : perfecting prison slave labor as the agribusiness model -- Enslaving prison bodies : labor division, prison rape, and the internal prison economy -- From Pachuco to writ writer : the carceral rehabilitation of Fred Cruz -- Eight hoe-sowing seeds of dissension : Chicanos and Muslims make a prison-made civil rights revolution -- Attica South : black political organizing against the prison plantation -- The Aztlan outlaw and urban black reform politics : the Carasco hostage crisis and the collapse of political reform -- Testimonios of resistance : the slave narrative and the prison labor strike of 1978 -- Stuck between justice and the carceral state : Ruiz v. Estelle and the politics of mass incarceration -- War on the prison insurgent : prison gangs, the militarized prison, and the persistence of carceral violence.

"In the early twentieth 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. However, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, and the 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. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book highlights untold but devastatingly important truths about the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States"-- Provided by publisher.