Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State

by Kirstine Taylor

Overview

The story of how the American South became the most incarcerated region in the world’s most incarcerated nation.

Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State examines the evolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this definitive era of carceral transformation and expansion in the southern United States. The demise of the county chain gang, the professionalization of police, and the construction of large-scale prisons 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 the crisis in the cotton fields 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, Taylor tells the story of how a modernizing south became the most incarcerated region in the globe’s most incarcerated nation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226838427
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	03/17/2025
Series:	Chicago Series in Law and Society
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Kirstine Taylor is associate professor of political science at Ohio University, where she is also a faculty member in the Center for Law, Justice, and Culture. Her research has appeared in American Quarterly, Law & Society Review, Theory & Event, and Politics, Groups & Identities.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Sunbelt Carceral State
Chapter 2. The Birth of Law-and-Order Politics
Chapter 3. Black Freedom Struggles, White Violence, and New Criminal Codes
Chapter 4. The Development of Law Enforcement Power
Chapter 5. Captive Labor, Prisoners’ Rights, and the Postwar Prison Boom
Chapter 6. Conclusion: Contesting the Carceral Present

Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Taylor has masterfully captured the history of crisis and change that ended Jim Crow and birthed a new regime of racialized violence. Motivated to create hospitable investment conditions in this transitional moment, southern politicians declared a new model of law and order and remade their states through expanded criminalization, police professionalization, and new prisons. Sunbelt Capitalism is a crucial contribution to the history of the southern carceral state and an urgent admonition about the expansive and legitimating potential of reform.

Judah Schept | author of "Coal

“Sunbelt Capitalism is a revelation. It is a masterful and compelling account of the interplay of racial, economic, and political factors that rendered the US South a pioneer of mass incarceration as liberal modernizers sought to shed the region's Jim Crow past by embarking on a brutal and unprecedented prison boom.

Marie Gottschalk | author of "Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics"

In this brilliant, carefully crafted book, Taylor traces the roots of our contemporary mass incarceration regime to an unlikely source: the emergence of capitalist development in the Sunbelt during the height of the Cold War. Taylor reveals how a cast of political actors and forces shaped the development of the racialized carceral state, from pro-growth boosters to ‘color-blind’ moderates. An indispensable analysis for understanding and contesting the modern prison state.

Daniel Martinez HoSang | Yale University