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drkew's review
5.0
Haley's research on African American women in Georgia convict camps, chain gangs, and domestic service captivity (paroled women forced into domestic service instead of having their sentences commuted) offers a critical intervention into understandings of gender under Jim Crow. The historic brutality of the carceral state is well-known to many historians but the many techniques of terror and torture inflicted on black women convicts (as opposed to their white female and black male counterparts) is less understood. When we think of violent terror from the late 19th century, we tend to focus our attention on people outside the carceral state (on lynchings, where the vast majority of victims were male). By opening a window onto the violent world of convict leasing, chain gangs, and domestic service Haley joins other scholars like Kali Gross and Talitha LeFlouria in calling for a more comprehensive accounting of American violence.
teriboop's review
4.0
In No Mercy Here, Sarah Haley examines the African American women’s experience in convict leasing and chain gangs of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly in Georgia and Alabama. Haley also discusses the making of the Jim Crow south and how this racial disparity contributed to the extreme brutal conditions that incarcerated people, particularly African American women, endured. This carceral system dehumanized and devalued its prisoners as they weathered conditions far worse than they suffered as enslaved people.
Initially, these women suffered extreme work conditions within the convict leasing system, frequently working alongside their male counterparts. In 1908, the convict leasing system gave way to chain gangs where the incarcerated suffered even more brutal conditions that they often could not survive.
Haley spends a chapter discussing the anti-convict leasing activism of Black and white women, following the work of Mary Church Terrell, Selena Sloan Butler, and the WCTU. Did the work of these activists help or hinder this broken carceral system? Convict leasing was eliminated but merely made way for the use of chain gangs.
Haley also examines records, letters, and pleas for parole and commutations. Many of these pleas fell on deaf ears. Most of these women wanted to live the last few years of their lives in freedom, quietly with their family. In this section, Haley clearly shows the disparity between the incarceration experience of African American women and white women. White women prisoners rarely served much if any of their light sentences, where African American women rarely served less than the extremely long sentence they received for trivial (or not) crimes.
These women suffered brutal abuse and dehumanizing treatment. They resisted but endured. Their plight was documented in their letters and pleas but also poems and songs. Haley looks at the early blues music of notables such as Bessie Smith and Victoria Spivey, who chronicled the African American women’s carceral experience. These songs live on today and are no less potent in their message.
Initially, these women suffered extreme work conditions within the convict leasing system, frequently working alongside their male counterparts. In 1908, the convict leasing system gave way to chain gangs where the incarcerated suffered even more brutal conditions that they often could not survive.
Haley spends a chapter discussing the anti-convict leasing activism of Black and white women, following the work of Mary Church Terrell, Selena Sloan Butler, and the WCTU. Did the work of these activists help or hinder this broken carceral system? Convict leasing was eliminated but merely made way for the use of chain gangs.
Haley also examines records, letters, and pleas for parole and commutations. Many of these pleas fell on deaf ears. Most of these women wanted to live the last few years of their lives in freedom, quietly with their family. In this section, Haley clearly shows the disparity between the incarceration experience of African American women and white women. White women prisoners rarely served much if any of their light sentences, where African American women rarely served less than the extremely long sentence they received for trivial (or not) crimes.
These women suffered brutal abuse and dehumanizing treatment. They resisted but endured. Their plight was documented in their letters and pleas but also poems and songs. Haley looks at the early blues music of notables such as Bessie Smith and Victoria Spivey, who chronicled the African American women’s carceral experience. These songs live on today and are no less potent in their message.
jane_seymour7's review
3.0
This book is DENSE. As much as I enjoyed Haley's writing style, it definitely requires you to use all of your brainpower. Also, I found it to be a bit redundant; as much as I enjoyed it and learned a lot from it, I felt as though Haley was making the same points with different historical examples. While it discusses incredibly important information about gendered racial terror in the Southern carceral system, it is definitely something that I would only pick up for academic purposes.
roseatwood's review
3.0
This book is DENSE. As much as I enjoyed Haley's writing style, it definitely requires you to use all of your brainpower. Also, I found it to be a bit redundant; as much as I enjoyed it and learned a lot from it, I felt as though Haley was making the same points with different historical examples. While it discusses incredibly important information about gendered racial terror in the Southern carceral system, it is definitely something that I would only pick up for academic purposes.
zachsw's review against another edition
5.0
Haley has written a fantastic and important account of the history of black women's convict labor in Georgia and its relationship to the making of Jim Crow-era racial capitalism. An incredibly rich archive combined with incisive and rigorous interdisciplinary analysis more than does justice to the lives and struggles of the women whose stories Haley recovers, which making clear the stakes of these women's exploitation and oppression and their freedom dreams, acts of sabotage, and cultural practices, embodied in blues feminism, in the history of US white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. This is a text that should have a major impact on prison studies, labor history. African American Studies, Women's , Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies.
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