Summary Of Worse Than Slavery By David Oshinsky

Book Critique

“Worse Than Slavery” by David M. Oshinsky

Yamilex Diaz

Stockton University

GSS 3204: Incarceration in American Society

Dr. Christine Tartaro

Historian David M. Oshinsky (Worse Than Slavery) draws on materials throughout the book the history of race and it’s relationship through prisons in the South where the “first circle” was located, the United States own gulag, the Mississippi’s Parchman State Penitentiary. Where the researcher built on others historians studies of emancipation, reconstruction and the post-reconstruction, Oshinsky established Mississippi’s Parchman prison farm as a sharecropping, lynching, convict leasing, and the segregation that replaced slavery. Not only was slavery replaced, but it was shown that

Lawlessness was what ruled the lands until order was settled in, through the system. As a way to control, officials began utilizing criminal law to their advantage, by forcing freed slaves back to captivity, under the state’s control. With no actual prison, politicians, businessmen, and sheriffs took it upon themselves to use the prisoners for what they thought better. Injustice and violence against the African American population was popular in many states, especially in the South, where groups not only used political influence to downgrade the rights of African Americans but also, arson, intimidation and lynching. This might have been one of the “better” moments that characterized Mississippi’s racial injustice. Oshinsky describes Mississippi as the nation’s most violent state. Nearly half a century later, 1930’s, “Mississippians earned less, killed more and died younger than other Americans.” (Oshinsky, 1996; pp. 127) The violence present formed part of the criminal justice in American history; not surprisingly, convict leasing was invented in the same state. After the Civil War jails and penitentiaries became destroyed, during this whole event emancipation increased, more than doubled. An increase in crime and violence became came so much while reconstruction occurred. The state recurred to institutions, where the leasing of convicts was the only option available for their convenience. Since most convicts were black, very few whites cared of what occurred to them, as mentioned before. As Oshinsky noted, leased convicts didn’t get to serve their time when it came to ten years or more (Oshinsky, 1996 pp.46). The system was described by reformer George Washington Cable, as “worse than slavery”. So, it was that by the 1880’s it had become a total embarrassment to the whites of the state, by the time reformers crusaded against the horrible system. Success was seen almost everywhere by the twentieth