AFJ Voices | The True History of Mass Incarceration in America - Part 3

Part 3 - Jim Crow and the Criminal Legal System

As we explored in Part 2 of this series, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, except as punishment for a crime. Southern states quickly passed Black Codes that criminalized everyday behavior among newly freed Black people, while convict leasing allowed states to imprison Black men and lease their labor to private businesses.

By the late 1800s, Jim Crow shaped nearly every aspect of life. Laws determined where Black people could live, attend school, travel, eat, work, vote, and gather. Poll taxes and literacy tests restricted political participation. In 1896, the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson gave legal protection to racial segregation under the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

Police, prosecutors, judges, and all-white juries had enormous power over Black lives. At the same time, the portrayal of Black people, particularly Black men, as dangerous and criminal became increasingly embedded in American culture and institutions.

The Scottsboro Boys became one of the most infamous examples.

In 1931, nine Black teenagers traveling through Alabama were falsely accused of assaulting two white women. Eight were convicted and sentenced to death after rushed trials. The cases eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court and exposed fundamental inequities in the criminal legal system, including inadequate legal representation and the exclusion of Black Americans from juries.

The Scottsboro cases also reflected the narrative that portrayed Black men as inherently violent. As the United States began developing national crime statistics during the 1930s, Black Americans appeared dramatically overrepresented in arrest records. By 1947, FBI records showed that Black Americans accounted for approximately 26 percent of reported arrests while representing roughly 10 percent of the population.

Those numbers were being produced in Jim Crow America, where segregation, discriminatory policing, unequal courts, economic exclusion, and racial assumptions about criminality shaped the experiences of Black people.

At the same time, racial terror continued. Between 1934 and 1951, Tuskegee Institute records documented at least 87 Black people who were lynched in the United States. Throughout the 1930s, federal lawmakers attempted to pass anti-lynching legislation, but Southern senators repeatedly blocked those efforts.

This exposed another contradiction that Black Americans were being portrayed as a threat to public safety while Black communities were subjected to racial violence that the government repeatedly failed to stop. Meanwhile, the nation was expanding the institutions responsible for incarceration. The Federal Bureau of Prisons was established in 1930 to oversee a federal prison system that was already growing. Rikers Island Jail opened in New York City in 1932, and in 1934 Alcatraz became the nation's first maximum-security federal prison. By 1940, the federal prison system had expanded to 24 institutions holding more than 24,000 people.

This history reminds us that mass incarceration did not begin with the War on Drugs or the crime policies of the late twentieth century. Its foundations were built over generations, as systems of racial control became deeply embedded in American institutions.

By the end of the 1940s, America had expanded its prison infrastructure and further entrenched the racial inequities that continue to shape the criminal legal system today.

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