Policing, incarceration, capital punishment: these forms of crime control were crucial elements of Jim Crow regimes. White southerners relied on them to assert and maintain racial power, which led to the growth of modern state bureaucracies that eclipsed traditions of local sovereignty. Friction between the demands of white supremacy and white southern suspicions of state power created a distinctive criminal justice system in the South, elements of which are still apparent today across the United States.

In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights.

Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction / Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring Part I: Crime 1. The Trials of George Doyle: Race and Policing in Jim Crow New Orleans / K. Stephen Prince 2. "Many People 'Colored' Have Come to the Homicide Office": Police Investigations of African American Homicides in Memphis, 1920-1945 / Brandon T. Jett 3. Forced Confessions: Police Torture and the African American Struggle for Civil Rights in the 1930s South / Silvan Niedermeier 4. The South's Sin City: White Crime and the Limits of Law and Order in Phenix City, Alabama / Tammy Ingram Part II: Punishment 5. Testimonial Incapacity and Criminal Defendants in the South / Pippa Holloway 6. Sewing and Spinning for the State: Incarcerated Black Female Garment Workers in the Jim Crow South / Talitha L. LeFlouria 7. Cole Blease's Pardoning Pen: State Power and Penal Reform in South Carolina / Amy Louise Wood 8. Hanging, the Electric Chair, and Death Penalty Reform in the Early Twentieth-Century South / Vivien Miller 9. The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolins / Seth Kotch Contributors Index |"The essays in this book bring nuance to a range of conversations about carceral statebuilding. . . . All of the essays offer well-researched, complex methodological and topical interventions that highlight the racialized implications of Jim Crow governance." —Journal of African American History
"Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South brings fresh insights to our understanding of the development of racial disparities in law enforcement, incarceration, and capital punishment." —North Carolina Historical Review
"These essays provide a nuanced and necessary picture of the racialized nature of southern law enforcement in the Jim Crow era beyond the common tropes of convict lease, the chain gang, and police complicity in local lynchings." —Journal of American History
|Amy Louise Wood is a professor of history at Illinois State University. She is the author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940. Natalie J. Ring is an associate professor of history at University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author of The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930.