In a recent post, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson offered a familiar argument about the origins of mass incarceration in the United States:

Could this be the basis of the new Jim Crow? Could the incarceration of so many black men be a continuation under a different guise of the penal system that developed in the South after Reconstruction? Could this be, paraphrasing Robert Michels and our own use of his Iron Law of Oligarchy,”the Iron Law of Discrimination”?

To support their “New Jim Crow” interpretation, Acemoglu and Robinson draw on the work of David Oshinsky, whose book Worse Than Slavery examines the development of convict labor as the lynchpin of Jim Crow era black labor control.