The New `Peculiar Institution': On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto

Abstract

Not one but several `peculiar institutions' have operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States: chattel slavery from the colonial era to the Civil War; the Jim Crow system in the agrarian South from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution; the ghetto in the northern industrial metropolis; and, in the post-Keynesian age of desocialized wage labor and welfare retrenchment, the novel institutional complex formed by the remnants of the dark ghetto and the carceral apparatus with which it has become joined by a relationship of structural symbiosis and functional surrogacy. In the 1970s, as the urban `Black Belt' lost its economic role of labor extraction and proved unable to ensure ethnoracial closure, the prison was called upon to shore up caste division and help contain a dishonored and supernumerary population viewed as both deviant and dangerous. Beyond the specifics of the US case, this article suggests that much is to be learned from the comparison between ghetto and prison as kindred institutions of forced confinement entrusted with enclosing a stigmatized category so as to neutralize the material and/or symbolic threat it poses for the surrounding society.