From the Battlefield to the Cottonfield: Origins of Mass Incarceration

• In Event: The Political Legacies of Violence

Abstract

Historians often point to the convict lease system in the United States as the predecessor of the modern system of mass incarceration in the United States. What explains the geographic variation in the intensity of the convict lease system? I provide a historically rooted argument that locates the origins of the convict lease system as a social response to the legacy of the U.S. Civil War in the South. To test the argument, I collect a new dataset of fine-grained, administrative data from Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Mississippi and link it to the 1880 U.S. Census to explore the impact of Confederate recruitment and battle deaths and subsequent exposure to federal occupation during Reconstruction on the intensity of incarceration. In addition, I use plausibly exogenous variation in the destruction caused by Sherman's March during the Civil War to establish a causal relationship. The theory and results provide key insights into the legacy of violent conflict on the development of coercive state institutions.

Author

• Shom Mazumder, Harvard University