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By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the United States found itself in an unimaginable incarceration crisis. As the new millennium dawned, this country was locking up more of its citizens than any other country on the globe. By 2010, more than 7 million Americans had become trapped in the criminal justice system and more than 2 million of them were actually living behind bars. African Americans suffered this turn to mass incarceration most dramatically . Indeed, with one in nine black men aged twenty to thirty-four eventually imprisoned in America, as Lawrence Bobo and Victor Thompson recently pointed out, this nation is now not merely embroiled in a dramatic moment of “mass incarceration,” but is in the grips of severely “racialized mass incarceration .”1 And America’s embrace of such a vast and discriminatory carceral state has had a devastating impact—tearing at the social fabric of the poorest and most vulnerable communities, putting a serious strain on the economy, and even distorting the democratic process itself.2 For these reasons, the question of how Americans might step back from such a reliance on imprisonment, and how they might undo the current carceral crisis, looms large for scholars and lay citizens alike. One cannot, however, change a system that one doesn’t fully understand . In fact, this is not the first, nor the first staggeringly racialized, prison crisis that this nation has witnessed. We have been here once before. In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans were also imprisoned in record numbers; then as now, prisons were the site of serious labor exploitation; then as now, the human rights as well as civil rights of prisoners were completely disregarded. By closely examining why the nation’s first prison crisis came about, and by taking close note of how it was stemmed, scholars can derive new and necessary perspectives on the nation’s second, and current, prison crisis—where it came from and how it, From Researching the Past to Reimagining the Future Locating Carceral Crisis and the Key to Its End, in the Long Twentieth Century Heather Ann Thompson 46 Heather Ann Thompson too, might eventually be ended. In short, by walking more carefully through the prison horrors of the past, we get closer to eradicating those of the present. Prior to the American Civil War, the majority of African Americans lived in bondage. With the Thirteenth Amendment came freedom, and with freedom came extraordinary African American hope for the future and possibilities for self-determination.3 This very hopeful moment for the black community, however , also deeply threatened southern whites, who were determined to maintain complete control of the economy, the society, and the political sphere. In numerous ways, postbellum whites attempted to keep African Americans in positions of social and economic dependency, but arguably their most effective move was to completely overhaul the region’s criminal justice system and to embrace a brandnew policy of mass imprisonment.4 According to the historian David Oshinsky, postbellum whites believed firmly that “bondage had been good for the negro . . . because the system kept his primitive instincts in check. And Freedom was bad because those checks had been removed.”5 Almost immediately after slavery ended, then, whites began using the criminal justice system as a new “dragnet for the negro,” one that could keep African Americans in a state of fear much as had the Ku Klux Klan.6 Indeed, white southerners quickly realized that one of the most effective ways to continue to dominate African Americans, and to make sure that they did not demand their share of the civic and economic pie, was to criminalize their behavior. As the historian Mary Ellen Curtin has pointed out, when “African Americans asserted their freedom on the street, on election day, and in their efforts to buy and sell goods,” such actions “generated a legal backlash.”7 This meant—in terms both immediate and practical—that after the Civil War, localities began to pass altogether new laws that converted certain behaviors, never before prosecuted as “crimes,” into offenses punishable by incarceration. Unemployed blacks simply out seeking jobs, for example, could be charged with the crime of “vagrancy.” Local and state governments also increased penalties for such crimes as stealing livestock or grain, knowing well that newly freed African Americans might have to resort to theft simply in order to eat.8 For example, in 1876 the State of Mississippi “passed a major crime bill aimed directly at the...

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