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A review by teriboop
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley
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.