Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2011
In the first half of the twentieth century, parole in the Deep South of the United States was part of a nexus of penal mechanisms providing white employers with a pliant black labour force. By contrast, in New York, which was at the forefront of innovations in parole policy, there was a surprising interracial consensus among white parole administrators and politicians, civil rights activists, and black prisoners themselves that the African American community was integral to parole administration and success. This article explores why different constituencies supported this consensus through debates on parole in the black press and via the desperate, and invariably futile, letters that prisoners wrote to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These sources also indicate that, for black prisoners in New York, African American influence over the parole system was routinely constrained by widespread black poverty, racial segregation, and discrimination in employment.
I would like to thank Kate Dossett, Alex Lichtenstein and the journal's anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions at different stages of this article's development. I am also grateful to the British Association of American Studies and the British Academy for funding my research in the United States.
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71 Simon, Poor discipline, pp. 139–44. While recognizing the distinctive disadvantages of impoverished and segregated communities that many black parolees encounter, some recent studies note that the experiences leading to parole can also ‘have a levelling effect’ that contributes to relatively homogeneous experiences of parole across racial and ethnic lines. See Merry Morash, Women on probation and parole: a feminist critique of community programs and services (Lebanon, NH, 2010), pp. 53–8, and National Research Council (US), Parole, desistance from crime, and community integration (Washington, DC, 2008), p. 74.
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