Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South provides a curated, wide-ranging look at current scholarship on, as the introduction puts it, “relationships between the modernizing state, white supremacy, and crime control” (6). As the editors explain, “Americans are primed for a real reckoning with … incarceration, policing, and capital punishment. This collection contributes to that accounting by providing a historical perspective on these practices.” The book's “metaphors for understanding present-day problems in the criminal justice system,” they continue, “are rooted in the Jim Crow period” (2). But the scholarship in this book provides more than just metaphors for present struggles: it provides new windows into the past that are valuable on their own terms, and meaningful as predecessors to our modern systems of criminal justice.

While scholars of contemporary criminal justice have powerfully reflected on the integration between policing and punishment, historians focusing on the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries have usually picked one or the other to study; there is little integration of the two halves of the criminal justice system, unless it centers around one person's experience of both.Footnote ¹ This volume juxtaposes work on policing and punishment in the Jim Crow South. The editors introduce valuable themes—for example, the ways that modernization in the South shored up white supremacy; efforts to reinforce white control of the criminal justice system; and how African Americans interacted with these systems, both resisting them and using them for their own ends. For the most part, however, readers are left to make connections between the “crime” and “punishment” halves of this edited volume on their own.

Many of the works in this volume focus on the interaction of African Americans with white-dominated, white supremacist criminal justice systems. White officials’ tenuous control of these systems led to a wide array of efforts to gain more. K. Stephen Prince's work on George Doyle, a black officer in the New Orleans Police Department, demonstrates how Southern states had to build all-white police forces in order to enforce white supremacy effectively—a difficult task when black officers were already a part of the force, and civil service rules protected them from summary dismissal. All-white police forces, Prince points out, made it possible to build “ideological and institutional links between blackness and criminality (and, by extension, between whiteness and police power)” (30). These links are further demonstrated by Tammy Ingram's study of white organized crime in Phenix City, Alabama, where “immunity from prosecution was one of the rewards of white supremacy” (82).

But the power of the Jim Crow criminal justice system could never be absolute. Brandon T. Jett highlights how black witnesses, suspects, and community members interacted with the Memphis Police Department, mediating and controlling the flow of state power within their communities by reporting homicides, giving statements, surrendering themselves to officers, and sometimes even apprehending and delivering suspects. Silvan Niedermeier provides two case studies of police torture of black suspects as a “catalyst for civil rights activism” that brought questions about the commonplace brutality and torture of black people in Southern police custody to the attention not just of national organizations, but of local white citizens as well, as black activists and the defendants themselves pointed out the injustice of a practice that police officers saw as ordinary procedure (67).Footnote ² Amy Louise Wood, though focused on the paradoxical Southern progressivism of South Carolina Governor Cole Blease, shows how black inmates’ pleas for parole appealed strategically to Blease's demonstrated paternalism.

The lives of incarcerated black people are the core of Talitha L. LeFlouria's work on garment industry convict labor. She demonstrates that imprisoned black women played a significant part in the “[S]outhern industrialization experiment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (134), emphasizing the importance of “imprisoned women's quest to be ‘treated as humans’ and to have their humanity affirmed,” and providing a case study on how to bring their voices to the center of the narrative (134, 142).

Policing and penal practices were not always consistent in this period in the South. On the one hand, Wood explains that Governor Blease, while presiding over a strikingly personal system of justice, “adopted the language of Progressive Era penal reform … to enact what was essentially a revolt against progressive ideals—that is, the use of bureaucratic (i.e., modern, efficient, and scientific) state power to ameliorate social problems” (149). But as Vivien Miller and Seth Kotch explain in their closely related and strongly argued pieces on the death penalty, centralized, modern state power could serve Jim Crow and reinforce white supremacy just as well as decentralized local control. In fact, when it came to the death penalty, bringing it under state control led to stronger white control, eliminating black witnesses and removing reformers’ ability to redefine the meaning of the execution of black people.

Modernization and progressive reform were by no means inherently opposed to the project of white supremacy. In the South, efforts to centralize, reform, and technologize all managed to further the Jim Crow project instead of damaging or impeding it. As Ingram points out, even law-and-order efforts to “clean up” white organized crime could quickly be turned around to criminalize African Americans in a society where blackness had been marked as criminal. This is a valuable reminder to scholars of American history in general, especially those who study efforts at progressive reform and modernization, to prevent ourselves from getting caught up in the framing of our subjects. Progressivism and modernization can allow for, include, and even expand the power of oppressive systems.

This volume affords a broader understanding of the old Jim Crow compared with the new—an additional set of points to consider in relationship to our current struggles that allows us to see how some of these past wrongs may have laid the groundwork for present ones. The New Jim Crow, as described by Michelle Alexander in her eponymous 2010 book, is built and enforced through the criminal justice system, and this book shows that the police and the courts were an important part of the original version as well. Pippa Holloway does a great job of making the connection between her work on testimonial incapacity in the South and the modern-day discounting of testimony of those convicted of crimes, who are disproportionately African Americans and other people of color.Footnote ³ Holloway explains how a seemingly color-blind policy—in this case, not allowing those convicted of a crime to testify—was a way to pursue racist goals without explicitly stating them, and shows how Southern states doubled down on testimonial incapacity as the rest of the country was coming to view it as unjust. The rest of the volume offers fewer direct connections to our New Jim Crow, and it is often left up to the reader whether or not to connect this work to current issues, and if so, how to make these connections. There are valuable connections to be made, however, and the scholarly work in this volume offers many avenues for fruitful future research.