The Incarceral System

Because the Southern American economy was based on the backs of enslaved Black folks and the political landscape was based on white supremacy, the post-emancipation Southern economy necessarily had to find alternative ways to exploit Black labor and subjugate Blackness. One of these such ways was the development of the sharecropping system which kept Black workers on their former owners’ plantations. The second major way that the Southern political landscape and economy adapted to simultaneously subjugate Blackness and exploit Black labor was the expansion of the carceral system. For the carceral system to successfully serve its function of exploiting Black labor, large numbers of Black Americans had to be imprisoned quickly during reconstruction.
While scientific racism began much earlier than the nineteenth century, the true racists of the United States were supposed to be the (former) slaveholders of the confederacy, but Black criminality soon became the dominant discourse among social scientists. Demonstrating the limits of liberalism, social scientists like Nathaniel Shaler constructed widely accepted views that fell in line with the “progressive” ideas of Jim Crow modernity. To elaborate, Shaler simultaneously rejected the excuses for slavery the other white academics were publishing, but supported the notion that Black people were intellectually and morally inferior to their anglo-saxon counterparts. Despite having been taught by Shaler during his time at Harvard, W.E.B. Du Bois, an often overlooked foundational figure in the field of sociology, took on the project of refuting racist constructions of Black criminality,
Though criminal statistics were occasionally falsified to reinforce ideas of Black criminality, Black social scientists often provided alternative analyses of existing statistics to counter assertions that crime was a “Black” problem. For example, Cheryl Lynn Greenburg found that Black youths were more likely to enter the court system and face the consequences of “juvenile delinquency” than white youths, but rather than using this data to defend racial stereotypes, Greenburg explored the reasons why Black youth may end up in the system so frequently. Her research showed that racial profiling or preferential treatment by police, as well as access to resources before appearing in court, created the conditions for larger numbers of Black children to enter correctional facilities. Exploring the historic subjugation and unequal treatment of Black Americans to reinterpret racialized crime statistics was an effective way for Black social scientists to resist racist constructions of Black