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 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 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.

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