Taja-Nia Y. Henderson of Rutgers Law has posted Property, Penality, and (Racial) Profiling, which has just appeared in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties on ssrn. Her abstract is as follows:
This Article historicizes societal associations of “blackness” with criminality through an examination of the peculiar property security role of criminal law enforcement mechanisms (and spaces) in the service of slavery in the early American South. Drawing on archival and other historical source material to illuminate previously understudied functions and functionaries of law in a slave society, the Article demonstrates how the "mass incarceration" of slave property in penal facilities for matters falling entirely outside the dictates of the criminal law — whether for discipline, “safekeeping,” or sale — was a central element of the everyday law of slavery in early America. These practices not only shaped law enforcement in this period, but also helped to cement the cultural entwinement of race and criminal suspicion in the region.
The illustration is the Hanover, Virginia, County jail. I think this went back to before the War.
This looks extremely interesting. Thanks for posting.
Posted by: Steve Lubet | March 13, 2016 at 07:25 PM