Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). This book provides a comprehensive history of the virtual reenslavement of black sharecroppers through the peonage system. Debt-laden farmers were legally bound to plantations in the post-emancipation South. This books show how the sharecropping system, which began as a practical labor solution, instead formed a vicious system of involuntary servitude following the Civil War.

Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). This book is the first history of black, working-class incarcerated women in the post–Civil War South. In this work, LeFlouria argues that African American women’s presence within the convict lease and chain gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror.

Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996). This is the first book-length study of the history of the southern convict lease system and its successor, the chain gang. Lichtenstein argues that, after emancipation, convict labor was exploited not by those seeking to restore the social order of the slave South but by southern industrialists. The modernization of the New South was partially predicated on the use of prison laborers, who were leased from southern state penitentiaries to private industries where they could be forced to produce “twice the work of free labor.”

Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New York: Picador, 2010). This book explores the history of the Texas penitentiary system and provides an intersectional critique of the rise of America’s prison empire. Perkinson interweaves the history of America’s prison systems with that of slavery, race, and politics. Comprehensive and foundational, this study provides a much-needed historical basis for understanding the modern-day carceral state.