High Water Everywhere: Carceral Effects of the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood

Shih-Yen Pan, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
John Clegg, University of Massachusetts Amherst

For decades, social and economic life in the U.S. South after the Civil War was shaped by paternalistic institutions regulating the relationship between white planters and their black laborers. In the labor-intensive agricultural economy, planters relied on tenants for production and in return provided services such as protection, medical care, and legal assistance. Historical accounts suggest that planters sometimes intervened in prosecutions or paid legal fines to prevent workers from being incarcerated, binding them through debt to instead work on the plantation. This paper examines how disruptions to these relationships impacted black incarceration. We examine the consequences of the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood, which disrupted cotton production and led to large-scale displacement of black families and out-migration from the affected region. Using linked full-count census records and administrative records from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, we construct county-level estimates of black incarceration rate and prison admission rate. To estimate impact, we employ a difference-in-differences design that compares counties exposed to varying flood intensity before and after the flood. Results show significant relative increases in black incarceration rates in more heavily flooded counties by 1940. Our finding suggests that labor institutions in agriculture may have played an important role in shaping carceral outcomes in the post-bellum South.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 112. Effects of Environmental Pressures