From the Philadelphia Negro to the Prison Industrial Complex: Crime and the Marginalization of African American Males in Contemporary America

Slavery in the Atlantic world represents the first instance of the mass incarceration of African Americans. The geoculture of historical capital justified Black Americans’ slavery and the subsequent subordination of this group with the empirical knowledge produced by the birth of the social sciences in the nineteenth century. Historically, the American state and its monopoly over the use of violence played important roles in enforcing the cultural, social, and legal structures used to perpetuate Blacks’ marginalization and disenfranchisement. These structures were consequential in regard to Black males’ life chances and their positions in America’s racial and occupational structures. W. E. B. Du Bois, an unacknowledged founder of the discipline of sociology, utilized all the tools of the sociological discipline to delineate the life chances of African Americans in his classic book The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Therefore, this paper seeks to draw parallels between Black male Philadelphians in the late 19th century and the experiences of contemporary African American males nationwide.