John Clegg "Mass Incarceration in Comparative and Historical Perspective"

Thursday, October 13, 2022 4:30 PM EDT
Merten Hall, #1203

Join us in person or via Zoom in welcoming John Clegg in our continuing Fall 2022 Colloquium series!

Together with his co-author Adaner Usmani, John Clegg uses original data from the early 19th century to the present across more than a hundred countries to illustrate dimensions of mass incarceration that have gone mostly unnoticed in existing work. Our decompositions suggest that American mass incarceration is the result of America’s exceptional combination of high state capacity and high levels of violence. This combination of facts has its roots in American slavery, though not in ways commonly supposed. American slavery matters to mass incarceration not primarily because of its cultural or ideological legacy, but because of the role it played in deforming American political and economic development.

John Clegg is a Du Bois Research Institute Fellow at Harvard University and a Postdoctoral fellow in Economic History at Lund University. He works on the history of slavery and emancipation in the Americas, as well as the formation of the modern carceral state.

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