Why read Worse Than Slavery?

Book cover of Worse Than Slavery

Book description

In this sensitively told tale of suffering, brutality, and inhumanity, Worse Than Slavery is an epic history of race and punishment in the deepest South from emancipation to the Civil Rights Era—and beyond.

Immortalized in blues songs and movies like Cool Hand Luke and The Defiant Ones, Mississippi’s infamous Parchman…

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American history

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Worse Than Slavery as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Keri Blakinger

Author

One thing prisons purposely do not do is teach you anything about the history of prisons. If you want to do that, you’ll have to do it on your own—and Oshinsky is such a great start. His 1996 book details the roots of Parchman prison in Mississippi and draws a line from slavery to convict leasing to modern-day penal farms.

From Keri's list on to read in prison.

Ashley Rubin

Author

This is a horrifying book. It explores the rebirth of prisons after the Civil War in Mississippi, a rebirth that reimagined the purpose of prisons to be controlling and extracting labor from Black people. It is not an exaggeration to say prisons became a replacement for slavery in the South. The Southern States had prisons before the Civil War, but these prisons held mostly white people (Black people were typically punished by slave masters and overseers or via capital punishment when state authorities were involved).

These southern prisons were destroyed during the war and many such states lacked the…

From Ashley's list on the origins of American prisons.