Mass incarceration is one of the great injustices of our time. For decades, small numbers of committed activists have protested this practice. More recently, however, the issue has gained wider public traction, with even some mainstream politicians and conservative organizations suggesting that it is something we should not tolerate.
Despite this, it remains a subject whose history is often poorly understood. Few appreciate, for instance, that the southern exploitation of the labor of Black people tended to limit incarceration rates; that the period of mass incarceration is defined by growing class inequality in the risk of imprisonment; or, as explored in these pages last Spring, the extent to which mass incarceration is implicated in systems of labor governance.
On each of these issues, and many others, my thinking about mass incarceration has been informed by the work of Christopher Muller, a sociologist now at Harvard University, who studies the history of racial domination, labor exploitation, and incarceration. In this interview, I ask Chris to reflect on some of the topics we have discussed over the years, including what the public should know about mass incarceration and how this might inform our political thinking.
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The term we typically use to describe incarceration in the United States is “mass incarceration.” What do people mean by that term?
The term “mass imprisonment” is typically attributed to the sociologist David Garland, who defined it in a short essay published in 2001. Garland argued that mass imprisonment has two features. The first is a rate of imprisonment that is unusually high in historical and comparative terms. The second is what Garland calls the social concentration of imprisonment’s effects among particular groups. Imprisonment in the US could be called mass imprisonment, he argued, because it met both criteria. The United States’ imprisonment rate in 2000 was extraordinarily high relative to similar countries and relative to its past—increasing from roughly 100 per 100,000 people in 1970 to roughly 500 per 100,000 in 2000. And young Black men living in cities had an especially extreme rate of incarceration, which, Garland argued, affected their entire communities. In an influential study, Bruce Western and Becky Pettit found that the cumulative risk of imprisonment for Black men born from 1975 to 1979 was more than 1 in 4. For Black men in the same cohort who didn’t finish high school, the risk was greater than 2 in 3.
Some scholars have taken issue with the term “mass incarceration.” Loïc Wacquant prefers “hyperincarceration,” which he argues better captures the concentration of incarceration by class and place. Others have asked which countries we should compare the US to: Countries in Europe? Countries in Latin America?
In some of my past work, I have argued that we should conceptually separate the US’s extreme incarceration rate from Black-White inequality in incarceration because while the former is historically anomalous, the latter is not.
We often hear that incarceration was a kind of functional replacement for slavery after the Civil War. What is most important to know about the connection between slavery and incarceration?
I think people are right to connect slavery and incarceration. The question is how they are connected. After the Civil War, most southern state prison systems leased people in their custody to private companies. This practice, which came to be known as convict leasing, is usually what people have in mind when they argue that incarceration was a functional replacement for slavery.
Convict leasing clearly resembled slavery. It’s impossible to look at pictures of people held in the convict lease system and miss this resemblance. They labored in terrifying conditions. They were whipped and beaten. They were bought and sold. And Black Americans were confined in the convict lease system in vastly disproportionate numbers. Depending on your definition of slavery, you could even argue that convict leasing was a form of slavery itself.
But there are two reasons to hesitate about the claim that the convict leasing was a functional replacement for slavery. The first is the scale of the two systems. Before the Civil War, the vast majority of Black people in the South were enslaved. After the Civil War, in contrast, just a small fraction were confined in the convict lease system. Deprived of landownership, and surrounded by laws and violence that restricted their mobility, most rural Black southerners labored instead as tenants, sharecroppers, or agricultural wage workers.
Second, slavery was a predominantly agricultural institution. But most people in the convict lease system worked in industry, not agriculture. Agricultural workers sent to the convict lease system typically were sent away from the area, not returned to their employers. So most planters had an interest in keeping agricultural workers out of prison rather than in it.
How could planters keep workers out of prison?
Historical accounts describe several strategies. Some planters served as character witnesses or used their influence over local courts to intervene in prosecutions. Others punished workers themselves, often using violence.
But planters also used courts to procure a supply of forced labor. They gathered at courthouses and offered to pay the fines of people who had been convicted. Then they forced these people to work to pay off the debt. Convicted people faced the impossible dilemma of choosing between the brutality of the convict lease system and the trap of peonage.
How do these facts relate to regional and historical patterns in incarceration?
Well, because people whose fines were paid did not enter state custody, this form of peonage—sometimes called the criminal surety system—had the side effect of holding the South’s Black incarceration rate down. Understanding planters’ interests and influence over local courts helps to explain a puzzle: why, given all we know about the South’s brutality in this period, would it have lower Black incarceration rates than the North? And why, as I have shown in my work, would those rates be lowest in the South’s cotton growing regions, where slavery predominated?
One way to think about this is that it was the threat of incarceration more than its realization that allowed planters to establish a coerced labor force after the Civil War. When the demand for agricultural workers was high, the Black incarceration rate was relatively low for the same reason it was low during slavery: planters depended on the labor of Black agricultural workers just as slaveholders depended on the labor of enslaved people. So rather than view the South’s comparatively low Black incarceration rate as an indication of the region’s relative mercy or leniency, we should instead view it as an indication of continuing Black exploitation and unfreedom outside of the prison.
Even if incarceration was not a functional replacement for slavery, you mentioned that there has been a large and persistent racial disparity in incarceration throughout the 20th century. Can you describe how the Black incarceration rate has shifted over time and why?
Yes, even though the South’s Black incarceration rate was lower than the North’s through the mid-20th century, and low by today’s standards, the Black-White ratio in incarceration was still extremely high in both regions. In 1880, for example, Black Georgians were incarcerated at twelve times the rate of White Georgians. In my work on incarceration in Georgia after Reconstruction, I found that the Black imprisonment rate was highest in urban counties and in counties with the highest rates of Black landownership—those counties where Black people were more likely to be seen as competitors to exclude than as workers to exploit. Dan Schrage and I have shown that when the boll weevil infested Georgia, it reduced planters’ demand for agricultural workers, and led the Black prison admission rate to increase—but only for crimes that could be punished with a fine, that is, only those crimes that allowed planters to entrap convicted people in peonage. In other work, I have found that Black southerners’ risk of incarceration increased when they moved North and were forced into economic competition with European immigrants, who were both concentrated at the bottom of the northern labor market and overrepresented on northern police forces.
In short, through the mid-20th century, when the demand for low-education Black labor was relatively high, the Black incarceration rate was strongly affected by whether people who could influence the incarceration rate sought to exclude or exploit Black workers.
All of this changed with the mechanization of cotton harvesting. Critics of the idea that slavery and mass incarceration are related often ask, “if slavery and mass incarceration are connected, why did mass incarceration take off a century after slavery ended?” A key part of the answer, for me, is that cotton harvesting was almost fully mechanized between 1950 and 1970—the two decades that preceded the start of the prison boom. A lot of work on incarceration has focused on the effects of deindustrialization, but there has been much less of an emphasis on the collapse of agricultural employment. This is particularly important because the share of Black men employed in agriculture exceeded the share employed in industry. I view the mechanization of cotton harvesting as a necessary but insufficient cause of mass incarceration, and that’s the part of the story I’m working on now.
You have written recently about how racial and educational inequality in incarceration is changing. What have you found?
Yes, this is joint work with Alex Roehrkasse. We found that starting in the 21st century, the prison admission rate of Black Americans with no college education fell dramatically, while the prison admission rate of White Americans with no college education steadily increased. This caused the first major decline in racial inequality in prison admissions in decades. To be clear, the Black-White ratio in prison admissions is still very high—greater than 2 to 1—even when we compare people with the same levels of education. But that’s down from mid-1990s levels of roughly 6 to 1 for Americans with no college education and 8 to 1 for Americans with any college education. Meanwhile, educational inequality in the prison admission rate has exploded. The no-college to any-college ratio in prison admissions rose from around 6 to 1 in the early 1980s to more than 22 to 1 for Black Americans and 28 to 1 for White Americans by 2015. If we think of education as a rough proxy for class, this suggests that racial inequality in imprisonment is falling, while class inequality is rising.
Alex and I have only documented—not tried to explain—these trends. But it is striking that they mirror trends in life expectancy and intergenerational mobility. In our ongoing work, we have found that the prison admission rate of White Americans with no college education has risen for all major crime categories, which suggests that it reflects broad shifts in their life chances. I suspect that some of this increase is related to the fact that the decline in the demand for low-education workers that first hit Black Americans has since hit White Americans with greater force.
All that said, it’s important to point out that Black Americans still bear a vastly greater share of the indirect harm of incarceration. Persistent segregation has meant that middle-class Black Americans are much more likely than middle-class White Americans to live in poor neighborhoods. Because of historically low levels of wealth among Black families, middle class Black Americans are also more likely than comparable White Americans to have poor family members. As a result, Black Americans with high levels of education and income are more likely than White Americans with low levels of education and income to experience the imprisonment of a family member or to live in a neighborhood with a high imprisonment rate.
In sum, imprisonment is increasingly concentrated among America’s poor—both Black and White—but its indirect effects are disproportionately felt by Black Americans, both poor and not. These facts show how the contours of inequality are changing in 21st-century America. But they also point to a possible basis for broad coalitions aimed at challenging mass incarceration.
Are there general lessons about functionalist explanations of incarceration we can glean from your work?
I try to maintain a healthy skepticism of functionalist explanations. This isn’t to say that all forms of functionalist explanation are invalid—clearly, they aren’t. But I think we often unthinkingly fall into functionalist modes of reasoning without realizing it, and this can affect both our scholarly and our political conclusions.
Functionalist explanation is explanation by consequences. Rather than a cause pushing on a consequence, picture a consequence pulling a cause into being. In the argument that incarceration is a functional replacement for slavery, changes in the incarceration rate are explained by their consequences for racial inequality. This argument rests on the important insight that both slavery and incarceration have produced deep racial inequality. But what makes the argument functionalist is the further claim that they exist because they produce such inequality. When one system—in this case, slavery—is abolished, another—in this case, incarceration—emerges to perform the same function.
One underappreciated implication of this view is that it suggests that struggles against racial inequality will likely fail because toppling one of its causes will only lead another cause to spring up. Albert Hirschman coined a term for this belief in the capacity of power structures to coopt changes—the futility thesis—and he noted that it was a rare point of convergence between arguments on the left and the right.
A more historical account of patterns in incarceration since slavery should be able to point to specific mechanisms through which racial domination and broad economic transformations affect the incarceration rate. Establishing such mechanisms is not just analytically important; it is also politically important because mechanisms suggest points of intervention. If we understand precisely why incarceration rises and falls, that orients us to how we might reduce it.
More speculatively, given all of your work on incarceration, what do you think of prison abolitionism and prison reform?
Many of the first works on incarceration I read more than twenty years ago were written by prison abolitionists like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Joy James. I don’t think I would be a sociologist today without their influence. I suppose I’m less interested in the question of whether people call themselves abolitionists than in whether there are lessons we can learn from abolitionist thought, irrespective of what we call ourselves. Different people mean different things by the term, but I think abolitionists broadly have pushed us to think hard about what kinds of reforms risk reinforcing the scale of incarceration rather than reducing it. They have also stressed the importance of keeping in view the varied harms that people experience beyond those we have decided should be legally classified as crimes.
Clearly there are important debates to be had over when to support a given reform or who the term abolition mobilizes and who it alienates. But I’m struck by the considerable degree of overlap in the arguments of people who do and do not call themselves abolitionists. Abolitionists talk a lot about expanding systems of support that make incarceration less necessary. Meanwhile, mainstream economics research shows that receiving Supplemental Security Income lowers people’s likelihood of being charged with a crime and that Medicaid reduces men’s risk of incarceration, particularly for those who are using it for mental health care. I’d like to see more attention paid to these areas of convergence.
Finally, if people are interested in learning more about your work, what should they read?
I wrote a short paper in Science a few years ago that gives an overview of some of the arguments I’ve made here. That paper includes references to the empirical articles it builds on, all of which can be found on my website.
