About This Unit

The United States incarcerates a larger share of its population than any other nation, and it does so in starkly racial proportions. This unit treats that fact not as a malfunction of criminal justice but as the product of identifiable history: the lineage running from slavery through convict leasing, the chain gang, and Jim Crow policing into the late-twentieth-century build-up of what scholars call the carceral state. Michelle Alexander's argument that mass incarceration functions as a racial caste system — "the new Jim Crow" — anchors the unit, alongside political-development scholarship showing how statutes, budgets, and agency decisions, accumulated across decades and both parties, built the prison state law by law.

The unit's second thread widens the lens from the prison to surveillance — the watching, sorting, and tracking of racialized people that precedes and outlasts any sentence. Simone Browne's account of "racializing surveillance" traces these practices to the slave ship, the lantern laws, and the runaway notice, showing that surveillance has been a technology of racial boundary-making from the start. Recent scholarship extends the analysis to populations the literature long overlooked, including the fast-growing and undercounted incarceration of Latinas. Throughout, learners work with the data infrastructures — prison counts, demographic breakdowns, trend lines — through which the carceral system becomes visible at all.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Trace the historical lineage from slavery, convict leasing, and Jim Crow policing to contemporary mass incarceration, identifying continuities and transformations.
• Evaluate Alexander's "new Jim Crow" thesis, including the major scholarly criticisms and refinements it has generated.
• Explain "racializing surveillance" and analyze a contemporary surveillance practice as a technology of racial sorting.
• Interpret incarceration data — scale, racial disparity, trends, and gaps in the data itself — and explain what the data's blind spots, such as Latina/o undercounting, reveal about racial classification.

Keywords

• Mass incarceration
• Carceral state
• Racializing surveillance
• The new Jim Crow
• Prison-industrial complex
• Crimmigration

Open Educational Resources

• "American History, Race, and Prison." In Reimagining Prison. Vera Institute of Justice, 2018. Read the chapter.

Web report chapter · Open access.

Part of the Vera Institute's Reimagining Prison report, this chapter traces the entanglement of race and imprisonment in the United States from the end of the Civil War to the present. It follows the Black Codes and the convict-leasing system — under which Southern states leased predominantly Black prisoners to private employers, a status one nineteenth-century Virginia court described as that of a "slave of the state" — through the chain gang, the disproportionate confinement of immigrants and Native people, and the prison build-up of the late twentieth century. Written for general readers but documented with scholarly citations, the chapter compresses the unit's historical arc into a single reading and shows how a reform-oriented organization assembles that history into an argument for changing the present system. Learners encounter both the historical sequence the rest of the unit develops and an example of how advocacy organizations put history to use.

• 13th. Directed by Ava DuVernay. Netflix, 2016. Watch the film.

Documentary film (~100 min) · Open access (official free stream).

Ava DuVernay's documentary takes its title from the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime," and argues that this punishment clause created a legal throughline from emancipation to the present scale of imprisonment. The film follows that line through convict leasing, the rhetoric of Black criminality, the Southern Strategy, and the successive wars on crime and drugs, into what it terms the prison-industrial complex. Interviews range across scholars, activists, and political figures — among them Angela Davis and Newt Gingrich — presenting the claim alongside its critics, with archival footage and on-screen data throughout. For the unit, the film consolidates the historical lineage the readings develop into a single feature-length narrative and supplies a sustained statement of the continuity thesis — that mass incarceration is slavery reinvented — against which learners can weigh the historians' more qualified accounts.

• "The United States of Incarceration." The Marshall Project, 2020. Read the feature.

Data journalism feature · Open access.

Produced by the Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the criminal-justice system, this feature sets American incarceration in international and historical perspective, assembling figures on scale, cost, demographics, and geographic distribution. Each claim is sourced and each chart is built to be read on its own, so the piece functions as a quantitative companion to the unit's historical materials. It documents how far U.S. incarceration rates exceed those of comparable nations and how the burden falls unevenly across racial groups and regions. Learners encounter both a baseline picture of the system's present dimensions and a worked example of how data can be presented for a general audience — the kind of public-facing analysis the unit's data case study asks them to practice. The feature pairs with the Vera chapter, supplying the numbers behind the history the chapter narrates.

• "Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie." Prison Policy Initiative, 2026. Read the report.

Data report (with downloadable graphics) · Open access.

The Prison Policy Initiative's annually updated report addresses a question that is harder to answer than it sounds: how many people are locked up in the United States, where, and why? It gathers federal and state prisons, local jails, immigration detention, youth facilities, involuntary commitment, and the territorial systems into a single set of pie charts, with breakdowns by offense type and by race. The report's methodology section explains why a single national count is difficult to produce — the data are held by thousands of separate jurisdictions that classify and report differently — which connects directly to the unit's argument that what gets counted, and how, is itself a matter of racial politics. Learners encounter both a consolidated portrait of the carceral system's size and composition and a concrete demonstration of how the categories used to count people shape what can be known about them.

Key Scholarship

• Ng, Linny Kit Tong. "(Un)Forgetting Latinas in American Prisons: Addressing Rising Numbers and Reduction Strategies." Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law 26, no. 1 (2024). Read the article.

Law journal article · Open access.

Ng examines the rapid growth and systematic undercounting of incarcerated Latinas, a population she argues is rendered doubly invisible: by data systems that inconsistently record Latino/a identity, often collapsing it into other racial categories, and by a scholarship that has concentrated on the Black/white axis of incarceration. She connects the rising numbers to crimmigration enforcement, to racially patterned policing, and to sentencing practices, and proposes reduction strategies aimed at each. The article's central methodological point is that an undercount is not a neutral gap: when a group is misclassified out of the data, its situation becomes difficult to document, fund, or remedy. For the unit, the piece extends the analysis beyond the frame in which incarceration is usually narrated and ties together its three threads — the prison, surveillance, and classification — by showing how the act of counting, or failing to count, is itself a mechanism of the racial order.

• Hinton, Elizabeth, and DeAnza Cook. "The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview." Annual Review of Criminology 4 (2021): 261–286. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article (field review).

Hinton and Cook synthesize roughly two centuries of scholarship on the criminalization of Black Americans, tracing a sequence that runs from slave patrols and the Black Codes through the convict-lease and chain-gang systems to the federal wars on crime and drugs and the present scale of incarceration. The review surveys the historiography rather than advancing a single thesis, noting where historians agree and where they complicate simpler stories of unbroken continuity — for instance, by attending to Black communities' own demands for protection and to liberal as well as conservative policymaking. The article gives learners the current state of the historical field in one place and the scholarly grounding beneath the unit's more public-facing materials, including the Vera chapter and the 13th documentary. It also models how a field review organizes a large and contested literature into a usable map.

• Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. 10th anniversary ed. New York: The New Press, 2020 [2010]. Visit the book site.

Book.

Alexander argues that mass incarceration operates as a contemporary system of racial control comparable in function to Jim Crow segregation. On her account, the War on Drugs swept large numbers of Black men into the criminal-justice system, and the felony label that followed authorized forms of legalized discrimination — in employment, housing, voting, jury service, and public benefits — that persist long after a sentence ends. Because this exclusion is formally colorblind, attaching to a criminal record rather than to race explicitly, it accomplishes under ostensibly neutral law what segregation accomplished openly. The tenth-anniversary edition's preface responds to a decade of criticism, including the objections that the thesis gives too little weight to incarceration for violent offenses and to class, making the edition itself a record of how a contested argument has been revised under scrutiny. The book moved mass incarceration toward the center of public debate and supplies the unit's central interpretive claim, which its other readings test and qualify.

• Schoenfeld, Heather. Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Publisher page.

Book.

Schoenfeld offers a political-development account of how the American prison system was built, centered on Florida as a detailed case. She traces the carceral state to an accumulation of ordinary political decisions — court orders in prison-conditions litigation, statutes, budget allocations, and bureaucratic incentives — that compounded across roughly fifty years and across both political parties, sometimes through measures framed as reform. Where interpretive accounts emphasize the system's racial logic, Schoenfeld documents its machinery: the specific institutional steps by which capacity, sentencing, and enforcement expanded. The implication learners are asked to draw is that a structure assembled through identifiable decisions can, in principle, be disassembled through identifiable decisions, which reframes the question of change from one of will to one of levers. The book pairs with Alexander's: together they present the interpretive architecture of mass incarceration alongside the administrative and political mechanics that produced it.

• Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Publisher page.

Book.

Browne develops the concept of "racializing surveillance" — the use of monitoring, sorting, and tracking to produce and police racial boundaries — and locates its origins in the technologies of transatlantic slavery rather than in the modern security state. She reads the slave ship's ledger, the branding iron, the runaway advertisement, and the eighteenth-century "lantern laws" that required Black and Indigenous people in New York to carry candles after dark as early instruments of racial surveillance, and traces their logic forward into contemporary biometrics, airport screening, and identity verification. Alongside this, she theorizes "dark sousveillance": the practices through which surveilled people watch, document, and evade the systems watching them. For the unit, the book supplies the analytical framework for its second thread and the conceptual link between the prison and the wider apparatus of tracking that operates beyond any prison wall, establishing surveillance as a technology of racial boundary-making with a long history.

Case Studies

• Visualizing Abolition: Art Against the Carceral State

Public art from Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Visualizing Abolition initiative (UC Santa Cruz) · Visual-analysis / gallery-walk activity.

A visual-analysis activity, conducted as a virtual gallery walk, in which learners examine works from Mural Arts Philadelphia's restorative-justice and abolition-themed public-art programs and from the Visualizing Abolition initiative at UC Santa Cruz, asking how artists render visible a system built to disappear people. The activity treats public art as a form of "watching back" in Browne's sense and asks what such work can and cannot accomplish against carceral surveillance.

• Counting the Carceral State

Vera Incarceration Trends dataset and Prison Policy Initiative graphics · Data-analysis activity.

A data-analysis activity in which groups each profile one county or state — Bronx County is the local option — using the Vera Institute's Incarceration Trends dataset and the Whole Pie graphics to describe its incarceration trend and racial composition, then audit the data themselves against Ng's argument, asking what the categories capture well and where Latino/a, Indigenous, or multiracial people disappear into them. The activity produces both substantive findings and a practical exercise in reading the limits of carceral data.

Questions for Reflection

1. On the historical lineage: The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime." Drawing on the unit's historical materials, evaluate how much explanatory weight that clause can bear: is the line from slavery to mass incarceration best described as continuity, reinvention, or something more complicated?
2. On Alexander: The "new Jim Crow" thesis has been both widely influential and seriously criticized — for centering the drug war, understating incarceration for violent offenses, and drawing the analogy to Jim Crow too neatly. Lay out the thesis and one major criticism of it, then explain where you land and why.
3. On Schoenfeld: If the prison state was built through ordinary politics — budgets, court compliance, incremental statutes — rather than a single malign design, what does that imply about how it might be unbuilt? Identify one concrete lever her account suggests.
4. On Browne: Choose a surveillance practice you encounter — transit cameras, school security, retail tracking, biometric login, neighborhood apps — and analyze it as racializing surveillance: who is sorted, by what cues, and with what consequences? Where, if anywhere, do you see "watching back"?
5. On Ng and the data: Ng shows that incarcerated Latinas are systematically undercounted. Explain how a failure of data becomes a failure of justice: what becomes impossible to know, to advocate for, or to remedy when a population is misclassified out of the count?
6. Synthesis across the unit: The unit runs two threads — the prison (Alexander, Schoenfeld, Hinton and Cook) and surveillance (Browne) — and both turn on how race is made and enforced through institutions rather than through intentions. Drawing on at least two of the unit's readings from across these threads, explain how counting, sorting, and confining work as related mechanisms of the racial order. Which of the unit's frameworks do you find most useful for understanding a specific case you know — a place, a policy, or a technology — and what does it leave out?

Further Readings and Resources

• "Nothing Has Made Me Feel More American Than Going to Jail." The Marshall Project, 2021. Read the piece.

Reported feature.

A reported piece from the Marshall Project whose title turns on the ironic relationship between incarceration and national belonging. It extends the unit's themes into recent journalism and gives learners who want to follow the present a current instance of how the carceral system is documented and narrated outside the scholarly literature, complementing the unit's other Marshall Project material as ongoing coverage of the system today.

• Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Muhammad traces how crime statistics themselves became racialized at the turn of the twentieth century, as social scientists, reformers, and officials read Black crime rates as evidence of group pathology while interpreting white crime as a product of circumstance. The book provides the deep history behind the unit's data theme, showing that the figures through which crime and punishment are measured were never neutral but were built into, and helped build, the racial order they appeared simply to describe.

• García Hernández, César Cuauhtémoc. Migrating to Prison: America's Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants. New York: The New Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

García Hernández examines the convergence of immigration enforcement and criminal punishment — the system often called crimmigration — through which immigrants are increasingly confined in jails, prisons, and detention centers. Written for a general audience by a legal scholar, the book traces how immigration violations came to be treated like crimes and how a sprawling detention apparatus grew up around them. It extends the thread Ng opens in the unit's Key Scholarship, situating the incarceration of immigrants within the wider carceral system.

• Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Publisher page.

Book.

Hinton argues that the carceral build-up of the late twentieth century grew not only from conservative law-and-order politics but from federal policy initiated under liberal administrations, as anti-poverty programs were folded into and eventually displaced by crime control. The book deepens the historical account in the unit's field review, showing how bipartisan federal decisions in the 1960s and 1970s laid the groundwork for mass incarceration.

• Benns, Whitney. "American Slavery, Reinvented." The Atlantic, September 2015. Read the essay.

Magazine essay.

A reported essay examining prison labor in the contemporary United States in light of the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause, which permits involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. Written for a general audience, it documents how incarcerated people work for little or no pay and connects that arrangement to the unit's question about the line from slavery to the present. A short companion to the first reflection question and to the 13th documentary.

• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Publisher page.

Book.

Gilmore offers a political-economy account of prison expansion in California, arguing that the prison boom absorbed surpluses of land, labor, capital, and state capacity rather than responding to rising crime. The book is the source of a widely cited definition of racism as the state-sanctioned production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, and it grounds the unit's structural account of how and why carceral systems grow.

• Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. Publisher page.

Book.

Davis presents a concise statement of the case for prison abolition, arguing that imprisonment has come to seem natural and permanent only through habit, and asking readers to consider alternatives to the prison as the default response to social harm. The book supplies context for the abolitionist positions voiced in the 13th documentary and for the unit's case study on abolitionist art.

• Vera Institute of Justice. Incarceration Trends (dataset and state/county fact sheets). View the dataset.

Dataset and fact sheets.

The Vera Institute's open dataset and accompanying state and county fact sheets, compiling jail and prison population figures across U.S. jurisdictions. It is the data infrastructure behind the unit's data case study, allowing learners to retrieve incarceration counts and trends for a specific county — Bronx County, for example — and to examine how the underlying categories do and do not capture the people they count.