Prison and Plantation

This broad, comparative study examines the social, economic, and legal contexts of crime and authority in two vastly different states over a one hundred year period. Massachusetts — an urban, industrial, and heterogeneous northern state — chose the penitentiary in its attempt to minimize the role of informal and extralegal authority while South Carolina — a rural southern slave state — systematically reduced its formal legal institutions, frequently relying on vigilantism.

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