The Political Economy of Carceral Development in the American South

• In Event: Confronting Exclusion and Inequality: Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

This explosive growth of the U.S. carceral system is well documented and increasingly understood to be a deeply problematic feature of the American state, but the question of how the world’s largest democracy came to imprison so many of its own citizens, and especially its citizens of color, remains an essential one for students of American politics and law. This paper uses original archival data and a case study approach to analyze the emergence and early development of state-level carceral policy in the American South. Many scholars of mass incarceration attribute its rise to “tough on crime” policies advanced by conservative southern Democrats and Republicans, populist southern backlash against the Civil Rights Movement, and the law-and-order politics of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy. In a departure from this scholarship, I trace the origins of state-level carceral policy in the U.S. South to changing dynamics of race and capitalism in the post-WWII decades. I argue the emergence and early development of state-level carceral policy in the region was the product of the governance of Sunbelt capitalism in the wake of legal and grassroots challenges to the Jim Crow order, specifically Brown v. Board of Education and the broader Civil Rights Movement. Seeking to protect solidifying relationships with northern companies opening offices and manufacturing plants in the state, North Carolina and Georgia turned to a proceduralist, race-neutral language of “law and order” that then became the basis for southern carceral policy: expanded state criminal codes, expanded investigative and law enforcement agencies, new corrections facilities, and new capacities to incarcerate juvenile offenders. In sum, the paper offers an analysis of how the Sunbelt South, in shedding Jim Crow and entering the national political and economic mainstream, came to help spearhead the rapid expansion of the capacity of the American state in to surveil, police, and incarcerate its citizens.

Author

• Kirstine Taylor, Ohio University