Among the most hidden-in-plain-sight aspects of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s are the ways in which the movement leveraged the racism of the criminal-justice system to advance a critique of white supremacy. Indeed, from Rosa Parks's famous arrest on a Montgomery bus in 1955 to the thousands of people arrested in Freedom Rides, voter registration efforts, and attempts to desegregate a variety of public institutions, the black freedom struggle was intimately entangled with a critique of prisons and policing. Historians have not ignored the civil rights movement's carceral focus so much as taken it for granted. Narratives of arrest and imprisonment, both the abuse suffered and the counterfactual ways in which the movement undermined the prison's control, account for some of the most dramatic elements of civil rights historiography and memory. But it has yet to receive sustained analysis. In light of the growing attention to the American carceral state, however, this attention is growing.

Zoe Colley's Ain't Scared of Your Jail is the first book-length treatment of the civil rights movement's strategic repurposing of the prison. Colley describes the book's goal as exploring the personal experiences of jailed civil rights activists in the context of different movement campaigns. Reviewing some ground familiar to civil rights historians, Colley shifts the analytical focus by putting arrest and imprisonment at the center of the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) and the sit-in insurgency, Freedom Rides, and local campaigns throughout the South between 1960 and 1964. This is a welcome intervention, and one that subsequent scholarship should take up with greater force and depth.

Colley's narrative is clean and largely compelling, making the text suitable for undergraduate usage alongside other texts on the civil rights movement. And her emphasis on personal experience in a movement context is appreciated. The book contains several vivid anecdotes, culled from both archives and secondary sources, of how members of the four most prominent civil rights organizations (CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC) navigated civil disobedience and confinement. Her discussion of the NAACP's ambivalent support in providing funds and lawyers to help activists who were pursuing a tactic it opposed was particularly interesting. Further, her mention of the Youth Emergency Fund developed specifically for women in the movement who were imprisoned is a tantalizing preview of a proto-feminist campaign against incarceration.

Ultimately, however, Ain't Scared of Your Jail is too slim a volume – six chapters plus an introduction and brief conclusion across just 120 pages of text – to take up in detail the issues that the topic deserves. As a result, several vital areas of interpretation are given short shrift or glossed over altogether and the book ends up duplicating some of the linear and binary problems of earlier civil rights scholarship. She gives scant attention to the prisoner rights movement that swept the United States in the late 1960s and the 1970s; her fleeting examples in the final chapter seem randomly selected and isolated from the larger national phenomenon. While her focus on the US South is understandable to an extent, she presents too great a divide between “the civil rights movement” and “the Black Power movement,” not contending with a diverse range of scholarship that shows that these were coterminous, mutually reinforcing developments. She claims that the Black Panther Party had a “vendetta” against police (108), ignoring the decades of police brutality that she describes throughout the text. Further, to claim that the 1965 march in Selma was “the last time that mass arrests captured the focus of the national mainstream media” (100) is to ignore the urban uprisings of the period, each one a test case of short-term mass incarceration, that were a fundamental part of the larger black freedom struggle.

While I appreciate Colley's efforts to be sensitive to the differences that race and gender made in shaping one's experience of imprisonment, this area of examination needed greater nuance and analysis. For instance, Colley writes that white male civil rights activists, because there were fewer of them and they were placed in cells with open white supremacists, therefore “faced the greatest danger in going to jail” (101). This claim undermines the prevalence of sexual violence against black women that Colley herself refers to elsewhere in the book, as well as the deeper structures of carceral violence that saw far more black people than white murdered by police or prison guards. More troubling, Colley accepts the problematic gendered claims of white supremacy as black emasculation. She uncritically accepts the idea of a “black criminal class” (7) and says that black men were “emasculated” and “powerless to intervene when their wives or children suffered violence” (90) – as if black women were somehow more empowered by or able to intervene against such violence.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Colley never mentions mass incarceration or the larger carceral state. She only mentions in passing the convict-leasing system and the larger structures of post-Reconstruction carceral rule in the South. She provides several moving passages detailing the ways southern politicians used the police and criminal-justice system to crush the movement, yet fails to connect those practices to the forty-plus years of hyper-incarceration that have disproportionately targeted young black men. This omission is especially disappointing given that she concludes the book by arguing that justice will remain elusive until there is “full recognition of the many lives that were also destroyed by the criminalization of civil rights activity” (120). But widespread, racialized criminalization is one of the primary legacies of elite response to the civil rights movement. Any notion of justice must take into account that the American state viewed the civil rights movement and related phenomena as a rationale to build the biggest prison system the world has ever known. The movement's wilful dalliance with the criminal-justice system was supplanted by a coercive and massive imposition of policing and prisons. This tragic postscript to the civil rights movement ought to be at the center of any analysis of black activism and the prison regime.