Since the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, James Baldwin’s life and work have undergone a renaissance in and outside of the academy. His penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, which recounts the story of a young African American man who is falsely imprisoned, resonates not only with the Black Lives Matter movement but with the history of mass incarceration. As scholars such as Elizabeth Hinton have demonstrated, draconian prison sentences and police surveillance were inextricably linked to the Civil Rights Movement. If Beale Street Could Talk can be read as a novel that responds directly to the oppressive shifts in policing measures during the 1960s. In fact, as scholars such as D. Quentin Miller have argued, much of Baldwin’s work is preoccupied with what the writer called “the criminal power” of white authority. Examining one of Baldwin’s least studied novels through the lens of carceral studies sheds light on his development as a writer at a point in his career when critics were dismissing him as out of touch with the harsh realities of American political life.

This chapter critically examines the public criminal justice system and argues that its failures have encouraged private parties to respond to criminal activity without resorting to the public system. Specifically, the public criminal justice system incarcerates an enormous percentage of our population, disproportionately affecting people of color, with almost no attempt to rehabilitate or reintegrate the perpetrators of crime. It does not satisfy – nor is it designed to satisfy – the needs of crime victims. And, recently, significant numbers of people have begun to reevaluate the scope and mission of both the police and the prosecutors, which will result in a partial repurposing of the public criminal justice system and will create gaps in enforcement that will be filled by private actors.

This chapter centers the liberated African Adelino Mwissicongo’s biography from slavery to apprenticeship and from apprenticeship to incarceration for theft in the context of the struggles for “full freedom” by liberated Africans between 1850 and 1864, the radical transformation of Rio’s urban economy and social landscape, and the discourse on vagrancy and criminality that distinctly identified free people of color and Portuguese immigrants as objects of police surveillance in the last decades of slavery in Brazil. The chapter places Adelino’s story in relation to the problem of petty criminality and poverty as Rio underwent a rapid demographic transformation that saw a significant decrease in its slave population to under 17 percent by 1872, according to the first national census. I argue that the penitentiary became complicit in constructing a pathologizing discourse that branded liberated African men and women as “incorrigible” by collecting and providing documentary support for the denial or concession of freedom certificates.

The introduction problematizes the interpretation of postemancipation Brazil from the perspective of slavery’s abolition in May 1888 as a temporal watershed to explore the making of race, nation, and citizenship for people of African descent and their intersection with policing, crime, and punishment. It reframes the history of nineteenth-century Brazil through the lens of policing freedom, which reckons with the systematic implementation of criminal justice reforms that defined the terrain of freedom and citizenship for racialized Brazilians of African descent while slavery thrived in Brazil. It brings attention to the significance of the penitentiary in incubating changes in labor relations in nineteenth-century Brazil and its deployment as a site for the racialization of the poor, while anchoring these local developments within a broader global transformation of the labor regime of the Atlantic World by historians of the “second slavery.”

There are racial differences in treatment by police. As the percent minority increases within a jurisdiction, racial threat effects cause more intense policing against Blacks and Latinx. In response, racial and ethnic minorities use the political process to increase own-group representation and better treatment by police. Police respond to Black protests against abuse of authority with more aggressive policing. There are backlash (more shootings) and diversity (fewer shootings) effects by police in response to affirmative action lawsuits forcing the agency to hire more ethnic and racial minority police. Abuse of force increases when: an officer’s peer has been injured on the job, officers know the race of a civilian prior to interaction, White officers interact with Black citizens, and White officers are dispatched to a Black neighborhood. Police abuse of force has negative academic and behavioral effects on Black and Latinx youth. Mass incarceration has deleterious effects on Black families: reducing the probabilities of marriage and attending college and increasing racial inequality and the probability a child is born to an unmarried mother. Hate crimes are instrumental actions, increasing with racial economic competition. Increases in hate crimes increase racialization among the targeted social group.

The rise in prison populations in the 1980s coupled with the silencing of the voices of those in prison compromised the visibility of some Black writers.Writers who were not incarcerated began to write about the prison experience, especially in terms of its effect on families.Although that trend can be seen earlier and later, the neoconservative 1980s catalyzed the need for a new approach to Black prison writing that would enable prisoners’ stories to be told by family members.At the vanguard of that movement is John Edgar Wideman whose willingness to tell the story of his incarcerated brother changed the trajectory of contemporary African American literature and its intersection with prison writing.This chapter utilizes the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago in order to advance a broader literary/cultural critique.Foucault enables us to extend Wideman’s inquiry outward from prison into a series of institutions designed to preserve and promote the idea of racial hierarchy despite mythological national claims of opportunity, democracy, equality, and equal justice for all well after the abolition of slavery and the end of legal segregation.

This chapter discusses the theoretical controversies surrouding the death penalty, the status of the death penalty under international human rights law, the death penalty in the United States and China. It also explores other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishments including mass incarceration, life imprisonment, shackling, and solitary confinement.

In this Chapter, I use American mass incarceration and the War on Drugs to draw conclusions about the increasing use of the criminal justice system to combat the abuse of non-human animals. I conclude that expanding criminal sanctions will result not just in increased incarceration, but in net-widening and deprivation of civil liberties. Furthermore, such negative effects are likely to be unequally distributed, falling most heavily on communities of color.

This chapter places the criminalization of harm to non-human animals within a larger context of left and progressive efforts to use criminal law to address social problems. This chapter treats the animal welfare movement’s turn to criminal legal solutions as a case study of the broader phenomenon of “carceral progressivism.” Specifically, the chapter identifies this case study as reflecting two particularly common features of left or progressive criminalization projects: (1) the presence of a particularly vulnerable class of victims; and (2) the claim that criminal law can send a message about society’s respect for that class of victims and condemnation of harm done to them. Ultimately, the chapter argues that carceral progressivism – despite its ostensibly egalitarian or left commitments – risks reinscribing and legitimating the evils of the carceral state.

The first part of my conclusion recalls the journey of African Americans from the formation of the United States to the present as discussed in previous chapters. The second part of my conclusion looks forward to improve education for Black students. Learning from research in education since Brown v. Board of Education and from dramatic wealth differences between white and Black graduates at different levels, a variety of efforts have been made to improve Black education. There are political hurdles to spending money on Black education and conflicts with the effects of mass incarceration. The possibility of educational success for all Americans, like the health of all Americans in the pandemic, may remain illusive.

The Great Migration ended in 1970 as manufacturing was replaced with electronic goods. Wages stagnated, and income inequality increased rapidly. This led to a new Gilded Age. Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs. Blacks were opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam War, and he penalized them by incarcerating them. This, helped by state laws and President Reagan, led to mass incarceration – which became known as the New Jim Crow. Public education was reserved for suburban whites, while urban Blacks were in prison or attended underfunded schools. The Flint, Michigan, water crisis demonstrates the difficulty of urban Blacks as jobs and urban facilities disappeared. President Obama was the first Black president, elected in the financial crisis of 2008. The Supreme Court nullified the 1965 Voting Act as it had done with amendments in the 1880s. Obamacare was the most enduring achievements of Obama’s presidency.

This chapter analyzes how emotions are expressed in the development of international law about contemporary slavery and in its current media coverage. This chapter also concentrates on the role of emotional concepts in the continued racialization of contemporary slavery and mass incarceration in the Atlantic world.

Describes the mass incarceration problem, the cultural reasons it exist in the U.S., why the time is ripe for reform, and how algorithms can help reduce incarceration

This chapter examines Wright’s critical appropriation of the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of the Robert Nixon murder trial (1938-39). Although Nixon was tried and executed for murdering Florence Johnson (a white woman), the Tribune routinely – and groundlessly – called the Black teenager a “rapist.” As Wright reminds us, if fascination with the condemned African American criminal dates back to the Puritan gallows ritual, the trope of the “Black beast rapist” evokes lynching in the post-Reconstruction South. With Native Son’s pointed revisions of the Tribune’s racist coverage, Wright exposes the press as the conduit by which the extrajudicial violence and dehumanizing rhetoric of the lynch mob entered the Northern courtroom.

In 1851, Frederick Douglass publicly challenged the position of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society that the U.S. Constitution was a proslavery document. As an enslaved child, the self-taught Douglass had identified literacy as “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” The same insight prompted the mature author and editor to part ways with Garrisonian moral suasionists in order to join “legal suasionists” like antislavery constitutionalist lawyers Lysander Spooner and William Goodell. From the 1840s through the 1890s, Douglass promoted the legal literacy of everyday African Americans (free and enslaved) while developing his own legal-critical analysis of American racism. Committed to wielding the “forms of law and . . . rules of hermeneutics” on behalf of freedom and equality, Douglass tirelessly challenged the increasingly biopolitical orientation of post-Reconstruction legislation and jurisprudence. From slavery to mass incarceration, Douglass insisted, racism is incompatible with the rule of law.