REIMAGINING LOUISIANA’S PENOLOGICAL HISTORY AS THE PRECURSOR TO NATIONAL INCARCERATION

43 pages. A thesis presented to the Department of Geography and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Arts, Spring 2016.Louisiana's incarceration rates are substantially higher than any others in the country. The state's high rates are symptomatic of a pattern ingrained within the state's penological history, which Louisiana State University's Mark Carleton exposed in his book Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System. In 1969 Carleton told the story of Louisiana's prisons in order to prove that Louisiana's story contained something that made it distinct, different. Carleton warned his readers about the dangers of having a penal system that is so heavily rooted in the economic system of the state. My thesis identifies the framework that Carleton created in the 1960s and goes further to show that Carleton's framework also applies to incarceration in Louisiana during the 1980s, 1990s, and through today. Reading Carleton in the context of today's mass incarceration shows that Carleton's book contained a premonition and a pattern that can be generalized to represent today's national incarceration situation