“A little world within itself”: The South Carolina Penitentiary and the Roots of the Carceral State

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AbstractThis article tracks the buildup of the South Carolina criminal legal system between 1867 and 1899 through three eras of its state penitentiary: from the politics of reform to convict leasing to the prison plantation. To track the delayed emergence and unusual trajectory of South Carolina’s criminal legal system, I argue that two approaches became entangled after the Civil War: On the one hand, a modern, nationalized politics of reform, and on the other, a decidedly Southern vision of crime and punishment haunted by the afterlife of slavery. It was the tension between—and variegated blending of—these two approaches that yielded a hybrid carceral project and set the trajectory for the state’s criminal legal system as it entered the twentieth century.