JOHN CLEGG

webinar link: https://zoom.us/j/94411419327    

Title: Carceral Legacy of Slavery 

Abstract: Recent social scientific research has explored the long-run effect of place-based variation in the extent of slavery on many later and present-day outcomes, including poverty, inequality and racial prejudice. Yet this literature has largely ignored the effect of slavery on incarceration, despite the fact that racial disparities in US incarceration rates are often attributed to the legacy of slavery. Prior research has been limited by the absence of county-level data on carceral outcomes. In this paper I gather new decennial data on total incarceration, black incarceration, and racial disparity in incarceration at the county level from 1860 till today. Contrary to my prior assumption, I found that while the share of slaves in a county's 1860 population is often positively associated with later total incarceration rates in that county, it is consistently negatively associated with later black incarceration rates, as well as the black/white disparity in incarceration. Yet these low levels of black incarceration co-exist with higher rates of lynching and of executions of black prisoners in former slave counties during the Jim Crow era. I hypothesize that this pattern is explained by the willingness of former slave-owning landlords to intercede on behalf of their black tenants in court proceedings, thereby establishing a form of dependency ("judicial peonage'') that acted as an alternative to incarceration. This system in turn depended on brutal forms of legal and extra-legal punishment for those tenants who lacked the “protection” of a landlord. The effect was that African American tenants in the Black Belt tended to avoid the high incarceration rates that black people experienced in other areas of the South (and the North) but only because they were subject to more brutal forms of localized social control. 

Bio: John J. Clegg is an historical sociologist working on the roots of mass incarceration in the United States and the comparative political economy of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world. He il Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences and a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a comprehensive crowd-sourced database of African American Civil War soldiers as well as a large scale research project on the political economy of mass incarceration. His work has appeared in The Cambridge Journal of Economics, Social Science History, Critical Historical Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, Catalyst, and the Journal of Historical Sociology.