Slave markets and slave jails in the United States

It was by looking at stories of Black women trafficked through the domestic slave trade, which I view as the genesis of the mass incarceration epidemic, a system that impacted approximately one million enslaved people, 400,000 of whom were Black women.

And none of these people that were trafficked through this system and through the slave jails, the private slave jails that were created to facilitate it, None of them had committed a crime.

Their only crime was having black skin and being enslaved.

And so for me, it was tracing these women's stories that led me to understanding that the system of mass incarceration started in chattel slavery and also that what we know as the for-profit system of incarcerating people, that is essentially the way that people are incarcerated in this nation, people are incarcerated for profit, that has its origins in the domestic slave trade.

So there's so much to also be said about that chapter of this history and the revelations that came about in the book as a result of the research that I did.

So let's talk about your research.

And we'll take the clock all the way back because the first chapter of this book Talks about slave jails.

And can you break down for...