Georgia's Penal Reform
This 1908 law allowed judges to parole prisoners into private homes creating a new system of domestic servitude for black women
the parole act of 1908
This pregnant woman wrote to the Georgia Prison Commission protesting she was being treated “like a man”, exemplifying resistance to gendered dehumanization
Hattie Johnson
Georgia’s Carceral System is Key infrastructure that produces and reinforces what?
Racialized constructions of gender and gendered divisions of labor
How did the use of Parole negate the logic of Chain Gang reform?
It still forced a form of private punishment
Under Parole, Black women were forced to labor as domestic workers for white families, giving new meaning to what concept
The prison of the home
These two women were ordered to leave the state or rearrested and sent to the chain ganging because they "threatened the moral fabric of the entire town”?
Hunter and Addis
Between 1908 and 1938 how many black women were sentenced to misdemenor chain gangs?
nearly two thousand black women
How Did the Domestic Carceral Sphere leave black women “vulnerable” to “moral and physical control by prison authorities"?
Isolating them from their communities
What was Sarah Haley referring to when she said “giving new meaning to the concept of the prison of the home”?
Black women being forced to labor as domestic workers for white families under parole.
In what ways did black women show resistence to social and economic subordinance?
- They refused to live in the homes of their employers
- They Engaged in collective work stoppages
- They left the south and migrated north.
Black women’s ability to do both road labor and domestic labor marketed them as able to occupy non-normative gendered positions described by Spillers
ungendered
Warders sent monthly reports to the state about the parolee’s behavior; what is the result of a negative report?
reimprisonment at the State Farm
Geogria's penal reform showed that punishment servedd a larger pyrope within the souther industrial development
Economic labor control
Camp describes black women showing resistance they would showcase it by getting away from the enslavement by being able to dress up. How does Haley showcase how black women have some form of resistance?
- in the face of such representational and economic attacks, black women used myriad forms of resistance to combat their social and economic subordination.
- 1910 Minnie Smith was sent to the Cobb County chain gang at age sixty-one for selling whiskey. Proclaiming her innocence, she declared at trial, “if I am to go in stripes and chains, let me go for what I have done.”30 She requested clemency on the basis of her age and the fact that she had dropsy; in the words of her attorney, she was “about worn out.”31 After being denied clemency on her first try, she submitted a second application several months later, which was approved.
Open ended question.
What part of black women's labor was exploited in systems of labor coercion (e.g. formal slavery, indenture servitude, debt bondage, [or] convict leasing)?
Women's reproductive labor
*SPECIFICALLY* Caring labor
The domestic carceral sphere show this specific Hartmann concept in which freedom and captivity folds into each other
“double bind of freedom”