Mass incarceration’s tools derived from slavery-era controls on blacks

Evidence

For these targets there was a vast repertoire of surveillance and disciplinary technologies available, much of it deriving from slavery and post-Reconstruction approaches to controlling blacks. What Rebecca M. McLennan (2008) labels the U.S. “mode of punishment”— an ongoing, contested, and unstable interaction of “forces of repression” on the one hand, with the “social relations of repression” on the other— entered anew phase. A massive increase in incarceration— unabashedly and disproportionately targeting black and brown men— began in the early 1980s and has continued until the present. The “race to incarcerate” was multiply determined: it afforded major opportunities for profit-making and privatization, it thrived on the politics of fear, and it was traditionally associated with racism (Mauer 2006 ; Wacquant 2009; Soss et al. 2011). — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 206

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow argument that mass incarceration is a new racial control mechanism continuous with slavery and Jim Crow.