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 around the worldooverwhelmingly 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 lifeo from numbing boredom to hard
labour, from meagre pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain
from illness or violenceodemonstrated 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. Ethan Blue is an Assistant
Professor of History at the University of Western Australia.
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