This racial disparity is hardly a function of crime. Over the past quarter-century, U.S. incarceration rates have nearly doubled, while crime rates have been cut in half.
How did we get to this place? Although slavery ended in 1865, America came up with plenty of reasons to lock up large numbers of Black people in the years that followed. The legal justification was established in the Black Codes — loitering and vagrancy laws passed after the Civil War to restrict freedom. The moral justification developed as white society promoted racialized stereotypes that related Black bodies to animalistic brutes to be feared, especially by white women.
The not-so-hidden financial justification was the desire to bring Black people back to tobacco and cotton fields. After the end of slavery, prisons became a new path to provide free or cheap labor for plantations. Within a century, that labor was used also for governmental contracts and private industry. Along with the new sharecropping system after the Civil War, the Southern plantation system kept churning out product — all at the expense of Black humanity.