From Plantation to Prison: The Origins of American Mass Incarceration

John Clegg and Adaner Usmani

With few exceptions, no country in world history has incarcerated as large a share of its population as does the contemporary United States. Yet while most research on punishment observes this comparative and historical fact, historical and especially comparative research into mass incarceration is rare. We use original data on penal systems across dozens of countries, spanning the early 19th century to the present, to illustrate dimensions of mass incarceration that have gone mostly unnoticed in previous work. Mass incarceration is the result of America’s exceptional combination of high violence and high state capacity, but high state capacity distributed in a peculiar way for a developed country. We suggest that this combination of facts has its roots in American slavery, though not in ways commonly supposed. American slavery explains mass incarceration not primarily via its cultural legacy, but because of the ways it divided the poor and empowered the rich.