Sunbelt Capitalism, Civil Rights, and the Development of Carceral Policy in North Carolina, 1954–1970

Abstract

This article investigates an important yet poorly understood aspect of the origins of the U.S. carceral state. Many explanations attribute the rise of mass incarceration to the conservative tide in American politics beginning in the late 1960s: “tough on crime” policies advanced by southern Democrats and Republicans, white backlash against black civil rights, and the law-and-order politics of Nixon's “Southern Strategy.” But in focusing on conservatives, prevailing theories have ignored how the changing economic and political landscape of the post-WWII South shaped how policymakers thought about crime. This article examines how key elements of the carceral state emerged in the rapidly growing, metropolitan, and business-minded Sunbelt South between 1954 and 1970, using North Carolina as a test case. Drawing on a variety of archival sources, it unearths how moderate southern politicians with material links to extra-regional sources of capital, political links to northern liberal elites, and ideological links to postwar liberalism pioneered state-level carceral policy. It argues that the swift development of crime policy in midcentury North Carolina was the product of how the state's moderate elites chose to govern the emerging Sunbelt economy in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education and the civil rights movement. The problems of rampant civil disorder, racial extremism, and lawlessness, they argued, threatened the economic progress of North Carolina and required the implementation of strong yet race-neutral crime policy. This study offers an analysis of how the Sunbelt South, in shedding Jim Crow and entering the national political and economic mainstream, came to help spearhead the carceral turn in American politics.