For Emile Durkheim, writing in the nineteenth-century, punishment
was simply understood as a clear response to the criminal behavior
a society experiences. Today's penal institutions challenge such a
simple understanding. Inseparably linked with many aspects of
society, they are profoundly shaped by the traumatic events and
changes a society undergoes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the
American South.
Georgia embraced the concept of the penitentiary as a form of
social control earlier than most of its southern neighbors. Its
penal code of 1816 replaced or curtailed such traditional
punishments as whipping, the pillory, fines, or death. Georgia's
control over felony convicts effectively began in 1817, when the
state prison at Milledgeville accepted its first convict.
Martha A. Myers finds that Georgia also led the region in
embracing the convict lease system as an alternative to
incarceration. In Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, she
examines the social, political, and economic forces that shaped
punishment over a seventy-year period. Between 1870 and 1940,
Georgia's system of punishment shifted from capital and corporal
punishment to hard labor in the penitentiary, then to the convict
lease system, then to county-run chain gangs, and then back to
incarceration in prison. This book forges a connection between
these dramatic shifts and analyzes three facets of punishment for
black and white men: rates of admission to the penitentiary, the
harshness of sentences, and the ease with which felons achieved
release from the penitentiary. Her findings challenge the
conventional notion that hard times invariably prompt harsh
punishment. In uncovering the complex link betweensocial change and
southern punishment, Myers reveals the poverty of current theories
of criminal punishment.
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