The Civil War and the Carceral State: Shifting Interpretations of Entangled Histories

Abstract: This article examines how recent scholarship has reframed the historical relationship between slavery, the Civil War, and the US carceral state. For a generation, a "slavery-to-prison" paradigm, emphasizing direct historical continuities between slavery and incarceration, has dominated both scholarship and public debate. However, over the past decade, historians have relocated key dynamics associated with "mass incarceration"—racialized policing, interventionist governance, coercive labor, and extractive penal labor—to the early republic and to regions beyond the South. Rather than treating Emancipation as the singular hinge in the history of American punishment, recent literature reconstructs older and uneven entanglements of state power, race, labor, and confinement. Although a new synthesis has yet to crystalize, this article argues that the field has reached an interpretive inflection point.