"The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration"

This is quite interesting, a plausible alternative to the account popularized by Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow.

(Thanks to Chris Lewis for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM:  From the essay:

Race is relevant because it is our best explanation for the absence of a working-class movement on the American continent, and thus the persistent underdevelopment of American social policy.⁷⁷ American slavery and then Jim Crow delayed the proletarianization of African Americans, with the result that they arrived in Northern cities after the first wave of American industrialization, in urban environments in which pivotal, scarce resources (jobs and housing) were hoarded by the first and second generations of established white ethnics. This was an environment destined to yield working-class disunity. Black Americans strove to penetrate well-protected labor and housing markets. It was no surprise that established incumbents would craft caste-based remedies to exclude them. Such strategies were rational, even if suboptimal in the long run.

In this sense, partisans of the standard story are not wrong to link American mass incarceration to American slavery. But they are connected not because slavery established some transhistorical imperative that America be always a land of white domination. Rather, they are connected because the plantation economy tied African-American labor to the land until 1940. Blacks were thus bypassed by America’s industrial boom. They are connected also because slavery was largely responsible for an American federalism which assigns law enforcement to those parts of the state least capable of paying the higher costs of redistributive remedies.⁷⁸ In the final reckoning, the story of the twin exceptions that have been the subject of this essay starts with this history.