Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State

"Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State examines the revolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this definitive era of carceral transformation and expansion in the U.S. South. The demise of the county chain gang, the professionalization of police, and the construction of large-scale prisons - built one right after the other for decades - were among the sweeping changes that forever altered the southern landscape and bolstered the region's capacity to punish. What prompted this southern revolution in criminal punishment? Kirstine Taylor argues that crisis in the cottonfields and the arrival of Sunbelt capitalism in the South's rising metropolises prompted lawmakers to build expansive, modern criminal punishment systems in response to Brown v. Board of Education and the Black freedom movements of the 1960s and 70s. Taking us inside industry-hunting expeditions, school desegregation battles, the sit-in movement, prisoners' labor unions, and policy commissions, this book tells the story of how a modernizing South became the most incarcerated region in the globe's most incarcerated nation"--