Sara M Benson, The Prison of Democracy: Race, Leavenworth, and the Culture of Law,
| Author | John Bardes |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520915749 |
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
robbers or burglars. Most had been “disorderly” or engaged in “suspicious”
behavior. Officers used the “third degree” routinely to beat confessions out of
suspects, some of whom died in custody. They took black suspects on “one way
rides” into the countryside, threatening to kill them if they did not confess, and
sometimes killing them outright. They instigated mass arrests of black men when-
ever a sensational crime was committed. And Eugene Stanley, district attorney
from 1927 to 1935, made “racial control” his focus. In his first year, the conviction
rate for African Americans doubled and the rate for whites fell by half—a pattern
he sustained. Blacks and whites were equally likely to be exonerated in the early
1920s. But blacks were now four times more likely to be convicted.
Adler’s study is a worthy sequel to Dennis Rousey’s Policing the Southern City
(1996). The story of Jim Crow policing is as surprising and revealing in the early
20th century as it was in the 19th. It also raises questions. The Great Migration
began before the early 1920s, and population growth in New Orleans was not
unusually rapid in the 1920s. New Orleans’ population, black and white, had
grown at the same rate each decade since the 1870s, with only a slight drop in
the 1930s. Was the surge in homicide in New Orleans in the early 1920s caused by
demographic change, or did the First World War and the race riots of 1919
increase migrants’ willingness to use violence? Which cities experienced unusual
surges in homicide in the early 1920s, and which did not? Were more violent cities
demographically distinctive? And what of the fact that most cities and states expe-
rienced their worst surges of violence in 1918 and 1919, not the early 1920s? Adler’s
book offers a firm foundation on which to build. But without a broader look at
urban and regional trends, Adler’s persuasive explanations will remain provisional.
Randolph Roth
Professor of History and Sociology, Ohio State University, USA
ORCID iD
Randolph Roth https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7662-3317
Sara M Benson, The Prison of Democracy: Race, Leavenworth, and the
Culture of Law, University of California Press: Oakland, CA, 2019; 204
pp. ISBN: 978-0520296961, $34.95 (pbk)
Borders and contested spaces, Sara M Benson proposes in The Prison of
Democracy: Race, Leavenworth, and the Culture of Law, are woven deep into the
fabric of Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, one of the oldest institutions in the
United States federal penitentiary system. Built in the 1890s at what had been a
military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the penitentiary sits geographically
at several historic boundaries: between slave states and free states, law and the
560 Punishment & Society 22(4)
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