ABSTRACT
America's first three 'peculiar institutions', slavery, Jim Crow, and the ghetto, have this in common: they were all instruments for the conjoint extraction of labour and social ostracization of an outcast group deemed unassimilable by virtue of the indelible threefold stigma it carries. Just as bondage effected the 'social death' of imported African captives and their descendants on American soil, mass incarceration also induces the civic death of those it ensnares by extruding them from the social compact. Slavery is a highly malleable and versatile institution that can be harnessed to a variety of purposes, but in the Americas property-in-person was geared primarily to the provision and control of labour. Slavery, the Jim Crow system and the ghetto are 'race making' institutions, which is to say that they do not simply process an ethnoracial division that would somehow exist outside of and independently from them.
