ABSTRACT
The proportions of blacks, including black women, continuously swelled in the prisons of the Northeast and Midwest, while the previously white prisons of the South became engorged with newly freed blacks. Even the nascent prison system of the West imprisoned blacks in proportions that far outstripped their scanty representation in the general population. This chapter documents this phenomenon for the period 1865-1935, identifying ways in which the extralegal factors of sex and race influenced incarceration rates and prison treatment of black women in particular. It also examines variations in the effects of sex and race by region, period, and type of offense. Information collected from internal records of five institutions confirms the picture of a prison system that has, historically, incarcerated disproportionate numbers of black women. Racism was most obvious in southern criminal justice systems. After the Civil War, in Tennessee and other southern states, prison populations became predominately black.
