Oct 20, 2026 · 50 min · 13 segments
In Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (Beacon Press, 2022), historian…
Talitha L. LeFlouriaGuest
Sullivan SummerHost
And we'll take the clock all the way back because the first chapter of this book Talks about slave jails.
At the turn of the 19th century, around 1810, a couple of years after the United States abolished the transatlantic slave trade to the U.S., enslavers facilitated a new system of trafficking human beings known as the domestic slave trade,
Around that time, states in what is considered the Upper South, primarily Virginia and Maryland, were beginning to sell off their enslaved laborers in extremely large numbers to enslavers in the Deep South, what we call the Cotton South, places like Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, and the like.
In order to facilitate this trade in human beings, slave traders built private jails.
And they were exclusively for the purpose of imprisoning enslaved people.
So I think that this is a little, a missing piece when we talk about people being sold down the river, sold to the Deep South.
How do you facilitate a traffic in human beings affecting a million people? You build an extensive networks of jails.
And these jails extended from the Upper South all the way to the Deep South.
And so this is where the commodification and criminalization of Black people for profit starts.
This is where we get our first for-profit carceral institutions is in the slave jail.
And we'll take the clock all the way back because the first chapter of this book Talks about slave jails.
At the turn of the 19th century, around 1810, a couple of years after the United States abolished the transatlantic slave trade to the U.S., enslavers facilitated a new system of trafficking human beings known as the domestic slave trade,
Around that time, states in what is considered the Upper South, primarily Virginia and Maryland, were beginning to sell off their enslaved laborers in extremely large numbers to enslavers in the Deep South, what we call the Cotton South, places like Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, and the like.
In order to facilitate this trade in human beings, slave traders built private jails.
And they were exclusively for the purpose of imprisoning enslaved people.
So I think that this is a little, a missing piece when we talk about people being sold down the river, sold to the Deep South.
How do you facilitate a traffic in human beings affecting a million people? You build an extensive networks of jails.
And these jails extended from the Upper South all the way to the Deep South.
And so this is where the commodification and criminalization of Black people for profit starts.
This is where we get our first for-profit carceral institutions is in the slave jail.
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