The penalty of a tyrant's law: landscapes of incarceration during the second slavery

Abstract

This article explores the southern prison system during the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth-century USA, to reveal struggles over landscape and geography. It suggests connections between diverse institutions such as plantation jails, county and city jails, workhouses, state penitentiaries and slave pens that have not been conceptualized as part of a carceral system supporting slavery. Slaveholders' various means of using these institutions are outlined as are their perceptions of these prisons. The article concludes by discussing the perspective of enslaved peoples, arguing that prisons were the site of considerable resistance as slave geographies were unable to be completely confined by the expanding carceral system.