“Then as now, the vast majority of the imprisoned in the 1930s were poor and unskilled. The numbers of people behind bars who listed their occupation as “laborer” rose steadily across the decade.16 Some, but not many, were clearly political prisoners: when the state of California sentenced labor radical Tom Mooney to die for the 1916 Preparedness Day bombings, when it kept criminal syndicalism laws on the books and imprisoned labor activists (or neglected to arrest corporate-paid goons who attacked strikers), it worked in obvious ways to limit working-class movements. But most prisoners were just poor, and not highly politicized. Across the nation, prisons controlled people who threatened wage labor relations by finding ways to survive other than through wage work.Â
Theft was the most obvious of these, and property crimes made up the lion’s share of punished offenses in the Depression. The expansion of America’s consumer culture of the 1920s led, perhaps unsurprisingly, to an increase in property crimes. As historian Elliot Gorn has observed, “A world of material goods, made more available than ever with the expansion of credit, raised expectations. Glossy magazines glamorized objects of desire, nightly radio programs dramatized the good life, advertising taught Americans about the things they needed to make their lives complete.” These desires, once set in motion, would persist. Desperation drove many to theft in the 1930s, and desire, just as surely, drove others. In 1937 more people in the United States were imprisoned for larceny alone than for all violent and sex crimes combined.
Yet punishment entrenched hierarchies in complex ways. One can argue that nowhere was the unequal protection of private property and the state’s rough treatment of the poor more blatant than in prison, its most repressive apparatus. In the 1930s widespread working-class movements emerged to fight for higher wages and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Workers demanded the state’s protection from employers, the right to organization and collective bargaining, and support from the vicissitudes of an unstable economy. The New Deal, in its many forms and faces, promised succor for Americans down on their luck. From union halls to dance halls and from street parades to bowling alleys, radical, progressive, and multiracial movements grew. In such a climate, prisons might have been particularly vibrant locations of radical proletarian politicization, where, in Marx’s terms, the working class in-itself could become a class for-itself.
When I first undertook this project, I was inspired by Michael Denning’s book, The Cultural Front, which documented broad and multiracial working-class movements in the Depression years. I was driven in equal measures by the new social history’s effort to unearth previously hidden perspectives on racialized capitalism, and by a Foucauldian project of finding transgressive spaces and subjects for critical insight into the workings of modernity. I suspected that border state prisons during the Depression might have been sites of multiracial proletarian class formation. After all, it was in this period... that Georg Rusche and Otto Kircheimer, the Frankfurt School doyens of Marxian criminology, located punishment as being more closely related to political economics than to crime.
The Depression could have provided prime conditions for the development of a radical working-class politics, for inmates to find allegiance in similar conditions of poverty and stern treatment at the hands of the powerful. After all, New Left and Third World radicals would look to prisons for vanguard movements later in the century, and perhaps, I speculated, earlier forms might have existed. Yet judging from the evidence I found—most of it state authored, to be sure, what Ranajit Guha called the prose of counterinsurgency—this was scarcely the case in the 1930s.Â
The civil rights and Black Power-turned prisoners’-rights movement of the 1970s built on four decades of struggle, and came into fruition twenty years after global decolonization movements. But the Popular Front, as an opening volley in what some have come to call the United States’ long civil rights era, scarcely penetrated prison walls. Fleeting moments of cooperation, of multiracial and even radical community, existed in the prison cultures of the Great Depression, and the forms of resistance and ambiguities that punishment produced will be discussed in detail. But far more records revealed antagonism. Denning convincingly argued that labor unions, libraries, public schools, and state funding for artists were key institutional components of the Popular Front as a social movement. In marked contrast, prisons in the 1930s were state institutions geared toward the dissolution of collective class behavior and the imposition of gendered, racialized antagonism that proved resistant to collective challenge. In prison, racial differences were quite literally set in stone. For authorities, this was no mistake.”
- Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons. New York: New York University Press. 2012. pp. 24-26.
[AL: This quote and book inspired my own research - because the prisons of Canada during the Great Depression were somewhat different - and for a brief period there was something like a radical working class politics developed in federal prisons, especially at Kingston Penitentiary between 1931 and 1935.]
