Chains of the Past: How Texas Built Its Prison Empire on Slavery and Segregation Texas’s prison system didn’t emerge in a vacuum—it was built atop the foundations of slavery, segregation, and racialized punishment. The state’s earliest carceral institutions mirrored plantation life, with incarcerated Black men forced to labor in fields under brutal conditions1. Convict leasing,… Continue reading Southern Sentences, Post 2: Chains of the Past & From Plantation to Prison
Where Mercy Meets the Mic
On (In)justice 