Slavery's Carceral Legacy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2230488 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Clegg (0000-0002-5796-0307) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 130 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1351-1393 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9602 • E-ISSN: 1537-5390 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/733783 |
| OpenAlex | W4403971645 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 62 |
A burgeoning social scientific literature on the place-based legacy of slavery has mostly overlooked the effect of slavery on incarceration, despite the fact that the intensity and racial disparity of US incarceration is often attributed to its history of slavery. I analyze data on incarceration from 1840 to 2020 and show that the historic prevalence of slavery tends to be negatively associated with Black incarceration, especially under Reconstruction and Jim Crow (1870–1940). In line with recent work by Christopher Muller, I argue this is partly explained by white planters paying the fines of Black convicts, who would then have to work off the debt or suffer imprisonment. I conclude that the existing literature is not wrong to assume that Southern incarceration was shaped by slavery. But it shaped it in surprising ways that previous work has often failed to identify
Art · Criminology · Genealogy · Sociology · American History and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Race, History, and American Society
Twice the work of free labor
Worse than slavery
Spanish Central America
Chained in Silence
Big House on the Prairie
The Economic History of Latin America since Independence
Barbed Wire
Constructing social theories
Caste and Class in a Southern Town
Metaphors of Confinement
American Homicide
Crime and Social Justice
When the Levee Breaks
Good, Bad, and Ugly Colonial Activities
Slavery's Enduring Legacy
Exclusion and Extraction
Inequality does cause underdevelopment
Slavery and the Penal System
Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations
Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching
Between Slavery and Freedom on the Atlantic Coast of Honduras
A Note on the Identification of Common Geographies
American political development and new challenges of causal inference
Enduring Consequences of Dehumanizing Institutions
The Impact of Slavery on Racial Inequality in Poverty in the Contemporary U.S. South
Unemployment and Racial Differences in Imprisonment
The Shadow of Slavery
Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South, 1865-1940
Roots of Disorder
The Geography of Wage Discrimination in the Pre–Civil Rights South
Southern Agrarian Labor Contracts as Impediments to Cotton Mechanization
A Season for violence
Lynchings, labour, and cotton in the US south
Deeper Roots
Managing Mercy
National Crimes
Slaves of the State
Deep roots
The Political Legacy of American Slavery
Law, social policy, and violence
We Are Not Slaves
The Killing Fields of the Deep South
Albion's fatal tree . Crime and society in eighteenth-century England
No Mercy Here
Targeting Lynch Victims
Branches without Roots
The Political Economy of the Cotton South
Punishment after Slavery
Revisiting the Southern Culture of Violence
The Political Economy of Incarceration in the Cotton South, 1910-1925
Freedom and Convict Leasing in the Postbellum South
Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1880-1950
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |