Policing in America: From Slave Patrols to Mass Incarceration

Editor’s Note: In response to the death of George Floyd and marches calling for significant police reform, Court Watch of Dutchess County has decided to post a multi-part series called “Policing in America,” to educate the public on the racist evolution of policing in America and reform solutions that put the welfare of marginalized communities first.

To begin to understand modern policing and the rise of mass incarceration in America, we must begin at our country's colonial roots. Policing developed separately in the North and South. In Northern colonial America, law enforcement was a local responsibility. Groups of men formed watch groups to provide a wide range of social services to their community, including crime control. The colonies also employed for-profit-sheriffs, appointed by governors, who collected taxes, served subpoenas, and, to a small extent, prevented crime. In the South, law enforcement primarily consisted of slave patrols. Collections of slave owners selected by Southern state governments formed slave patrols to punish and track down slaves at large.

During this time, jails and prisons were primarily used for pretrial detention rather than punishment. Penalization was mostly fines, rehabilitative labor, or execution. This manner of justice continued, with minor reforms, until the second industrial revolution in the mid-19th century, which created America’s working class and drew over 20 million immigrants to the country. To counter the perceived threat that ethnic diversity posed to America’s social order, state governments created modern police systems to control the immigrants.

Modern police systems in the North were based on England’s London Metropolitan Police. These police systems were publicly funded, decentralized, regulated by laws, and concentrated on crime prevention—i.e., controlling the underclass. Meanwhile, following the Civil War, the emerging modern police system in the South perpetuated many of the practices of slave patrols through the enforcement of black codes.

Large corporations also hired police agencies to union-bust, an economically and politically useful practice since labeling the underclass as criminals “confused the issue of workers rights with the issue of crime” (Potter, 2013). By perpetuating a narrative that the growing number of strikers—primarily immigrants and laborers—were criminals, police justified the need for new technology, such as alarm boxes and patrol wagons, which extended their powers. Thus, since its early inception, the modern police system has thrived by persecuting marginalized groups: immigrants in the North and Far West, Mexican-Americans in Texas and the Southwest, and African Americans pretty much everywhere.

The prison system also underwent massive changes during this time. As a result of backlash against physical punishment and more regulations in the modern police system, incarceration became the primary sentence. To accommodate the growing number of inmates, congress passed the Three Prisons Act in 1891, which established the Federal Prison System.

Racism and corruption in early 20th-century police agencies also aided the rise in incarceration. Politicians hired police officers to intimidate voters and extorted political contributions from small businesses. In return, the police kept their stable jobs and partook in illegal activities as they saw fit. At the same time, police hunted down immigrants and African Americans for the same crimes or no crime at all.

The first Great Migration, beginning in 1915, brought millions of African American’s to Northern cities. This new diversity was met with regular abuse and arrests of African Americans by police officers. As a result, the “incarceration rate surged by 67 percent between 1926 and 1940, and the proportion of African American inmates increased by one-third” (Alder, 2015).

In response to police corruption and abuse, the federal government initiated police reforms beginning in 1929 and extending throughout the 1960s. These reforms separated police precincts from political wards, created new recruiting laws, and implemented military-like hierarchies in police agencies. Although these changes were implemented to prevent police corruption, many police departments became "inward looking, isolated from the public,” and militaristic (Walker, 1998). Police continued to use excessive force and target minority communities.

Less than ten years after the most substantial police reform, the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1967, the federal government initiated the War on Drugs. This new policy primarily criminalized the large African American population in Northern cities after the end of the second Great Migration, resulting in a 433% growth in the prison population from the beginning to the end of the 1970s.

Since then, other “tough-on-crime” measures led to the imprisonment of millions of people of color, leading to today’s mass incarceration. While modern police strategies are not as visibly and self-consciously discriminatory as they were during the 19th-century, they still have harmful effects on marginalized groups in our society, as we see when we turn to current practices in our next post.