The United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, including a disproportionate number of African Americans and Latinos. For many Americans, “mass incarceration” conjures up images of African American men bound in handcuffs, trapped in solitary confinement, or languishing for decades behind bars. Such gendered perceptions persist despite the fact that African American women are the fastest growing incarcerated population in the United States. A similar dissonance characterizes much of the scholarship on penal servitude in the postbellum South, which privileges the experiences of black men subjected to convict-lease systems or the chain gang. Building on the pioneering work of Mary Ellen Curtin and Kali Gross, historians are beginning to reimagine black captivity during the long twentieth century by centering the ordeal of incarcerated black women.

Talitha L. LeFlouria’s study of convict labor in Georgia exemplifies the best of this new work, integrating gender, race, and political economy into a robust analysis of Southern punishment at the turn of the twentieth century. LeFlouria draws on administrative records, newspapers, prisoner petitions, and correspondence to reconstruct the lives of black women condemned to penal labor in Georgia. Chained in Silence excavates both the “gendered workings of involuntary servitude” and the “lived and laboring experiences” of black convict women (5). Despite their small numbers relative to black men, LeFlouria argues that incarcerated black women were critical to Southern industrialization and central characters in the transformation of penal servitude between 1865 and 1930.

This story unfolds in five chapters, beginning with the emergence of widespread convict leasing following the Civil War. The retailing of unfree labor to private contractors simultaneously reduced public expenses related to managing carceral institutions and fostered economic diversification. Unlike convict-labor regimes in Alabama, for example, incarcerated black women in Georgia labored alongside male convicts, laying railroad track, mining coal and iron, and making bricks in addition to that most famous of Georgia occupations: picking cotton. These women were “producers in the South’s post-war industrial economy” whose exploitation enabled Southern entrepreneurs to sell commodities at discounted rates (9). Further, LeFlouria argues, racial ideologies were “crucial to the assembly and operation of involuntary penal servitude” buttressing Georgia’s nominally free labor economy (59–60). The state legislature invoked the specter of “black criminality” to pass vagrancy statutes and other policies designed to discipline black labor and undermine black freedom. African American women who labored as domestics were perceived to be especially dangerous because of their proximity to white families and were policed accordingly. Most black convict women were convicted of misdemeanor offenses; their inability to pay small monetary fines rendered them temporary slaves of the state.

Once incarcerated, however, black women also figured prominently in public debates over the nature of criminal justice in Georgia. Ubiquitous corporal punishment and sexual violation of black convict women underscored the archaic nature of convict-lease systems that essentially relinquished ownership of convicts to private individuals and their deputies. This looked a lot like antebellum chattel slavery. Indeed, black convict women shirked work, feigned illness, sabotaged production, and when they could, ran away just like their enslaved foremothers. LeFlouria uncovers many examples of resistance amid widespread suffering, showing how such acts provoked scandals with significant policy implications. As stories of sexual violence perpetrated against black women found their way into local and national exposés of Georgia’s convict-lease system, state legislators began to call for centralization and sex segregation and for “reinstating state control over state prisoners” (147). In this sense, black women were doubly productive as laborers and as ideological symbols in a broader political debate among white elites over whether the “New South” could ever escape its slave past.

Beginning in the 1890s, Georgia transferred convict women from across the state to sex-segregated, state-run factories and prison farms. Eventually, the legislature abolished convict leasing altogether and decentralized the punishment of misdemeanor offences, spurring an expansion of county-level chain gangs tasked with rebuilding the state’s outdated commercial infrastructure. Between 1900 and 1936, more than 2,100 black women were sentenced to chain gangs where they helped construct new roads connecting Georgia to a wider national economy (178). Despite the humanitarian rhetoric guiding penal reform, the abolition of the lease system only exacerbated the scandalous living and working conditions faced by black convict women in Georgia. Overseers of the public chain gang inflicted severe punishments for minor offenses, leaving many women mangled and perpetually unproductive. Once convicts belonged exclusively to the state they became even more disposable. Chained in Silence thus debunks the notion that penal servitude was merely “slavery by another name.” Unlike enslaved women, convict women were “economically valued only for their ability to produce labor, not laborers” (98). Black women’s decommodified reproductive capacities hampered the profitability of convict labor, prompting a “dramatic shift from conception to conviction as a means of growing bound labor forces in the New South” (190). Ultimately, LeFlouria suggests, convicts’ disposability rendered the chain gang worse than chattel slavery. While historians are likely to quibble over such claims, LeFlouria convincingly demonstrates that brutal regimes of penal servitude deserve a central place in unfree histories of American freedom.

The precise organization of penal servitude varied over time, but Georgia never abandoned the project of utilizing unfree, racialized, and coerced labor to pursue economic development. From augmenting workforces on rural cotton plantations to building the roads that took that cotton to market, black convict women played a central role in Georgia’s postslavery economy. Economic and business historians will surely want to know more about the concrete linkages between penal servitude and economic development in Georgia, a topic that remains somewhat elusive in the text, but LeFlouria provides an indispensable baseline for subsequent research into these matters. While Chained in Silence is a must-read for historians of slavery and abolition, Jim Crow America, and racial capitalism, it should also appeal to readers concerned with the origins of contemporary mass incarceration in the United States.