Western History Association 59th Annual Conference

“Except as Punishment for a Crime” Involuntary Servitude and the Birth of Carceral California

• In Event: The Birth Of A State: Slavery, Confinement, Incarceration, And The Origins Of Ethnic Cleansing In California

Abstract

Exploiting fears of race and lawlessness, in 1850 California gave birth to a carceral state, working a disreputable profiteer and the governor who promised to bring order to the new state through a state-funded prison industrial regime and a labor pool of convicted criminals. Rather than use the funds for a prison, Edsill arrested vagrants, unemployed men, and street children to create a mobile class of convict laborers and undercut wage labor and early unions, rented the convicts to himself and sailed a rotting prison brig around the Bay, leasing out prisoners to quarry heavy stones for the mansions and sewage systems for the new city. Finally, he paid himself hundreds of thousands of dollars to force convicts to build their own prison at San Quentin, a slave compound where unpaid convicts worked in silence in small factories built inside the walls to profit the warden and contractor. California’s private prison system and carceral state were born at San Quentin in the 1850s when Edsill vowed he had “full liberty to work said prison convicts at any and all mechanical branches of business that he may choose.” Claiming a sparse industrial working class and a growing criminal population, 19th century California attached forced labor to prison sentences, and barefoot prisoners worked 12 hour days in forced silence, making “jute bags” to hold the wheat of the new agriculture. Manufacturers used the prison rent-free, the state provided guards, and bought back the finished product. It leant prisoners’ bodies for medical experiments, including testicular transplants from corpses of men who had just been hanged, to stimulate youthful masculinity. I trace the origins of what Ruth Gilmore calls the California Gulag, in policies which founded the state’s agrarian, tourism, and manufacturing prosperity, its immigration policy, and its creative use of torture, including water boarding. Although some argue that now profits of prisons have replaced profits of prisoners, modern convicts still work in privately owned sweat shops e.g. to recycle toxic computer parts, sew “Made in America” labels onto tee shirts made in Honduras, and face solitary when they expose the system in the press.

Jean Pfaelzer is the author of Bound for California: The History of Slavery in California Yale Univ. Press forthcoming 2019-20; Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans Random House, Univ. CA Press, (NY Times 100 Notable Books) 4 other books, 2018 Two PBS and CPBS specials on Chinese Exclusion Act; curator for Smithsonian Museum of American History, former Exec. Director of National Labor Law Center; Senior Legislative Analyst US House of Representatives (Labor and Immigration) . Professor of English, Asian Studies, & Women Gender Studies University of Delaware.

Author

• Jean Pfaelzer, University of Delaware