TPRP is the first ever dataset to contain detailed biographical and demographic information about individual prisoners held in Texas jails between 1850 and 1914.
Born in the aftermath of the 2019 discovery of the unmarked burial sites of ninety-five African American convicts in Sugar Land, TX, and drawn from an exhaustive review of original manuscript records, the Texas Prison Records Project (TPRP) provides scholars of the state's criminal justice system with an analytical database that they have never had before. The research shows how assumptions of race and ethnicity affected the carceral experience during the convict leasing era. Data science allows TPRP to uncover patterns of incarceration, labor, commutation of sentences, and pardons capable of complicating previous historical narratives that made Texas’s administration of justice tougher but otherwise similar to other Southern states. Moreover, the database uniquely captures the prisoners’ individual and communal forms of resistance to the dehumanizing experience of incarceration and hard labor. The analysis of recidivism by towns and counties creates the premises to explore the justice system’s biases toward previously detained individuals. TPRP extends its assessment to prison officers, government administrators, and county judges to uncover connections that could put Texas prisons at the center of a system of crony capitalism. Finally, by recording the change over time in work camps’ names, locations, and ownership, TPRP maps convict leasing and labor with unprecedented precision and depth.
In addition to stimulating questions for comparative studies, TPRP holds also a translational value for it can translate historical observations to policymakers and legislators, promoting interventions to improve human conditions through reform.
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