From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, the Role of Prisons in American Society

[Joanne98]

African Americans, who make up one eighth the nation's population, account for about half of all US prisoners. But contrary to popular belief, it hasn't been this way for long. Blacks have only made a majority of new admissions to the nation's prisons and jails since 1988. Berkeley historian Loci Wacquant argues that America's reliance upon prison as the principal way of dealing with the black poor marks a qualitatively new stage in the Black experience. First there was slavery, then Southern rural segregation, followed by the enclosure of the northern ghetto, which has now been succeeded by the world's first carceral state. Like slavery, Jim Crow and the ghetto, prison has come to define for many of us what it is to be Black in America.

From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, the Role of Prisons in American Society

by Loïc Wacquant


Originally published, with extensive footnotes and additional material in New Left Review, January-February 2002.


Not one but several ‘peculiar institutions’ have successively operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States. The first is chattel slavery, the pivot of the plantation economy.

The second is the Jim Crow system of legally enforced discrimination and segregation from cradle to grave that anchored the predominantly agrarian society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition.

America’s third special device for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis is the ghetto, corresponding to the conjoint urbanization and proletarianization of African-Americans from the Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partially obsolete by the concurrent transformation of economy and state and by the mounting protest of blacks against continued caste exclusion, climaxing with the explosive urban riots chronicled in the Kerner Commission Report.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=514&Itemid=1

[KT2000]

1. Have often wondered

about the tolerance of the obvious drug use by celebrities in clubs and likely on the streets around them, while many people from minority neighborhoods are put away for drug use.
Just one example, but pretty glaring.