Plantation as paradigm is ahistorical- even the most common examples prove their analysis is sentimentalism

(Ruth Wilson, , 5-12)

The insistence on finding innocents among the convicted or killed both projects and derives energy from all the various “should not be in cages” categories such as those I listed above. But it also invokes, with stupefying historical imprecision, a cavalcade of other innocents to emphasize the wrongness of some aspect of mass incarceration. In particular, as if mass incarceration were the means through which we are presumed to have inherited duty for some set of the uncompensated tasks because of what our ancestors were violently compelled to do. It’s a reasonable extension given the historical facts of convict leasing and chain gangs that once upon a time were widespread. However, since half of the people locked up are not, or not obviously, descendants of racial chattel slavery, the problem demands a different explanation and therefore different politics. This does not mean that the lineage of abolition extending through chattel slavery is not robust enough to form at least part of the platform for ending mass incarceration in general. However, as it stands, to achieve significance, the uncritical extension of a partial past to explain a different present demands a sentimental political assertion that depends on the figure of a laboring victim whose narrative arc — whose structure of feeling — is fixed, and therefore susceptible to rehabilitation — or expungement — into relative innocence.