Mass Incarceration in the Service of Racial Project: Uncovering Historical Premise Through Critical Exploration of the Slave Dungeons in Ghana

Introduction

In her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander (2012) argues that the institution of racialized slavery was never abolished but renamed. The prison institution within the justice system is the new name, and the various aspects of the legal justice system interact with other institutions and organizations (e.g., education, housing, employment, and market) of the racial state to sustain racial subordination through mass incarceration of racialized groups, especially Blacks (Hinton & Cook, 2021). She expresses that “we use our criminal justice system to label people of color criminals and then engage in all the practices [slavery] we supposedly left behind” (p. 8). Currently, the United States has the highest incarceration rates when compared with other countries. Blacks/African Americans represent only 13% of the U.S. population but constitute 38% of the incarcerated population (see Figure 1, which was produced by the Prison Policy Initiative). Mass incarceration affects individuals, families, communities, and the well-being of society (Beckett & Francis, 2020; Tietjen, 2019). Given that social work focuses on the well-being of individuals and the general society (NASW, 2021), mass incarceration has critical implication for the profession.

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Figure 1.

Percentage of US Population in Prisons and Jail Facilities by Race.

Although America’s racialized slavery is linked with global white supremacy and empire-building processes in sub-Saharan Africa (Andrew, 2021; Ani, 1994; Asare, 2019; Nantambu, 1998), the scholarship on racism related to mass incarceration in the United States has paid limited attention to this understanding. This disconnection is not an aberration from the way racial thinking has been intricately linked to state formation process to reproduce racialized violence via national identity, national population, and labor (Battalora, 2013; Goldberg, 2002; Mills, 2022). That is, while structural construction of whiteness is connected to the transatlantic slave trade (TST) and settler colonialism to control and exploit those structurally and legally constructed as non-white (Kyere, 2024; Beliso-De Jesus et al., 2023; Mills, 2022; Virdee, 2019), its modern evolution operates to deny and reduce the transatlantic nature of racial marginalization to national boundaries (Goldberg, 2002). But as argued by Goldberg (2002), there is no “singular modern state, and there is no singular racial state” because the “modern states are racial in their modernity, and modern in their racial quality, raciality” (p. 7).

Modernity as conceived through Western imperialism is racial and intimately linked to the emergence, development, and the evolving dynamism of the state, which is philosophically, conceptually, and materially racial in character (Beliso-De Jesus et al., 2023; Goldberg, 2002). From this understanding, social work, at the state or private practice, is grounded within contexts that articulate and normalize racial thinking, racialized conditions, and racialized culture. According to Snowden et al. (2021), the root of social work in the United States is at the interface between the Abolitionist movement (1783–1888) and the Women’s Suffrage Movement (1848–1920). However, the profession abandoned Black communities during the early period of the Settlement Movement (1880s–1910s). Prospect of a united front of the enslaved Africans, the poor, and free Europeans grew among the ruling elites’ ability to maintain the social order needed to protect the political and economic interests especially in the aftermath of the Bacon Rebellion in 1676 (Battalora, 2021; Gregory, 2021). The European ruling class invented whiteness—ideological and structural forces that legitimate assorted norms, values, and culture as the acceptable standard of behavior, especially for persons structurally constructed and labeled as White to separate European descent from enslaved Africans and members of the Native tribes (Battalora, 2021; Fritz & Lewis, 2025; Virdee, 2019). Historian Edmond Morgan (1975, cited in Gregory, 2021, p. 8) contends that the ruling class’s solution to their perceived impending threat was to separate “dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt” (p. 8). Within this context, early social workers, mostly Euro-American women who had become white, saw social work as an extension of their role as mothers, focused on the maintenance of social order as opposed to justice and liberation from an oppressive system (Bussey, 2020; Snowden et al., 2021).

From the social work person-in-environment perspective (PIE; Cornell, 2006; Kondrat, 2013; Weiss-Gal, 2008), social work needs to attend to this history that continue to shape it and the racial ordering of the world and the relationship between the individual and multiple subsystems of the racialized state that fester institutionalized violence and conflict social work justice orientation (Bussey, 2020; Watson & Collins, 2023). Racial slavery from a transnational perspective is important to understand the root causes and mechanisms of structural violence like mass incarceration and the linked behavioral responses that social workers are called upon to address (e.g., mental health disparities, poverty, educational disparities, and human dignity) (Kyere et al., 2022; Farmer, 1996; Mullaly & West, 2018).

Heritage sites such as the slave dungeons in the coastlines of many West African countries where enslaved Africans were marketed and incarcerated enroute to their final destinations in the New World are embedded with data that can generate new insights to broaden our understandings of racial violence through prisons (Asare, 2021). Experiential observations of the conditions and the violence captured Africans endured at the European forts along the coast of Africa (see Figure 2) during the race-based TST suggest that mass incarceration is an accumulation of unjust structures and practices institutionalized through racial slavery. This insight calls for an interdisciplinary approach to research, integrating social science methods with historical approaches to data collection. Such integration can provide critical data required to effectively tackle mass incarceration and the injustices it inflicts on communities and society. ¹

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Figure 2.

Cells for Enslaved Africans Who Resisted Their Enslavement/Subordination (the left side), and for White Soldiers on Punishment in the Elmina Castle.

This article discusses a pilot project that critically observed and analyzed the condemned cells—spaces where enslaved men labeled disobedient were sent—within the enslaved dungeons in the Elmina Castle in tandem with a focus group discussion with college students in Ghana (see Figure 2 for detail description). The article explores whether parallels exist between the role that the condemned cells played in the subordination of enslaved Africans in Ghana during the TST and the role of prisons in the United States today in the racialized mass incarceration. Condemned cells were built into the Elmina Castle over a century before the first enslaved Africans were brought to colonial North America, and over two centuries before the founding of the United States, making the Gold Coast a strategic context to understand how the American racial hierarchy was experimented. Indeed, Africa has been regarded the laboratory for the development of the methods and racialized theories that cemented structural construction of whiteness and the violence that whiteness animates including mass incarceration (Beliso-De Jesus et al., 2023). Our work is inspired by the social work of museums (Silverman, 2010) and critical heritage studies (Apaydin, 2020; Johnston & Marwood, 2017; Wellington, 2011) that view heritage sites, including slavery heritage sites, as context for interrogating how historically unjust conditions have accumulated into the present to envision structural intervention. We explore the significance of heritage and historical sites of slavery in Ghana to understanding and addressing the problem of racialized state sanctioned control in the service of white supremacy.

In the section that follows, we first provide literature linking racialized slavery to mass incarceration. Second, we present the theoretical framework, collective cultural trauma, to shed insights on racialized mass incarceration in the United States. Third, we discuss the methodology for data collection, which is followed by the results and analysis. Finally, we discuss the results, drawing implications for transdisciplinary research within a transnational context to disrupt the patterns of continuity that reproduce the racialized carceral states.

Literature Review

When compared with other countries, the United States has the highest incarceration rates (Beckett & Francis, 2020). Although incarceration rates differ by state, nearly every single state constituting the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any independent democratic state across the globe (Widra & Herring, 2021). African Americans represent only 13% of the population but constitute 37.9% of the incarcerated population (Blackett & Duquesnoy, 2020). In 2016, Black Americans comprised 27% of all individuals arrested in the United States—double their share of the total population. Black youth accounted for 15% of all U.S. children yet made up 35% of juvenile arrests in that year (Sentencing Project, 2018). Black people’s interactions with police, judges, and other officers in the legal system are informed by racialized perception of Blacks. This perception assumes Blacks are inherently criminals who need to be managed through controlled mechanisms by the justice system (M. Alexander, 2020; Armour, 1997; Hicken et al., 2021; Martinez et al., 2023). Racialized perception of Blacks accumulates over multiple stages, through case processing, prosecution, and court disposition and contributes to disproportionately negative outcomes for Black Americans (Hinton et al., 2018; Martinez et al., 2023). It is negatively associated with access to a host of life-enhancing resources such as housing, education, health, and employment, credit market, and wealth-building opportunities (M. Alexander, 2020; Beckett & Francis, 2020).

Theoretical Framework

The current study is informed by collective cultural trauma. Collective cultural trauma is a disruption in the meaning-making process accompanying phenomena such as war, genocide, and slavery. It generates an indelible mark on group identity and collective memory over time (J. C. Alexander, 2013; Hirschberger, 2018). Collective cultural trauma emerges from collective interpretations, discursive practices, memory, and identity formation (J. C. Alexander, 2013; Wang, 2008). It signifies a tear in the social fabric of that enables social life. Collective cultural trauma impairs communal bonds and requires re-narration to repair altered social relations and identities (Hübl & Shridhare, 2022; Eyerman, 2022). Within the U.S. context, the racialization of humans through the invention of whiteness is a collective cultural trauma because it altered the communal bond that existed between and among persons of African and European descents and members of Native tribe prior to the Bacon rebellion in 1676 (Battalora, 2021). Similarly, across sub-Saharan Africa, it altered the dynamic of human relationships through the TST (Shumway, 2018). The TST obstructed and distorted Ghanaians’s (and Africans’s) ability to develop their own education, economic, social, and political system by the introduction of a system that was oriented toward capture and export of human beings and dependency on Europeans (Obikili, 2016; Shumway, 2021; Shumway & Getz, 2017; Whatley & Gillezeau, 2011).

Collective memory generation relative to TST can reveal the operation and continuity of white supremacy in the racialization process (Genovese, 1976; Gill, 2021). In this way, analyzing mass incarceration today through the lens of collective cultural trauma, we can visualize the dehumanizing relationships between and among post-slavery generations. This form of critical analysis can also expose the violent racialized structures built to sustain white supremacy through the assignment of racialized incentives to masses of individuals (both non-whites and whites) within a hierarchy-based system (Battalora, 2013; Harris, 1993; Mills, 2022). One critical pathway by which the application of collective trauma reveals the patterning of white supremacy through slavery to mass incarceration of Blacks today is the law (Armour, 1997). In a racialized society, law is constitutive of the structures, processes, and strategies by which the network of the racial state’s institutions functions to uphold white supremacy across time and generations (Z. D. Bailey et al., 2021; Gee & Hicken, 2021; Ray, 2019). In this regard, by applying collective cultural trauma as a theoretical framework, we argue that there is a need for critical exploration and reinterpretation of historical racial meanings archived in social structures and institutions. Such reinterpretation has been proposed to decrease the empathy gap, fostering solidarity and responsibility toward reparative structures and practices (J. C. Alexander, 2016).

Current Study

With the contention that sub-Saharan Africa was foundation to the design and strengthening of racialized ideas, the current study uses Ghana as a pilot context to explore European fortification structures established in Ghana during the TST. The current study analyzes focus group discussion data generated through critical observations and analyses of the condemned cells (see Figure 2) within the enslaved dungeons in the Elmina Castle. We explored whether parallels exist between the role that the condemned cells played in the subordination of the enslaved Africans in Ghana during the TST and the role of prisons in the United States today in the racialized mass incarceration. The study’s design was informed by social work of museum (Silverman, 2010) and critical heritage framework (Apaydin, 2020; Johnston & Marwood, 2017) with a focus on the process over outcomes, in shaping participants’ perception about a social phenomenon (e.g., mass incarceration).

By informing the methodology with these perspectives, the article is with the understanding that the slave dungeons in Ghana as heritage sites are embedded with stories or data that are critical for understanding issues of social injustice, such as mass incarceration, and theorizing solution (Apaydin, 2020; Johnston & Marwood, 2017; Silverman, 2010). The objects, symbols, and architectural designs that characterize slavery heritage sites (e.g., Figure 2) are data that can help us enter the imaginative space of historical figures to understand ideas such as racism with which they envisioned society over time (Wilkerson, 2020). Heritage sites thus can be a site for conceptualizing social action through an interpretative process grounded in consciousness that produces praxis.

Method

Participants (N = 11; mean age: 22.3; 55% male, 45% female) were undergraduate students at a public university in Ghana. All but two students were enrolled in the Humanities. The other two were tourism and management students. Two of the participants were in their freshman year (Level 100), two were in their sophomore year (Level 200), four were in their junior year (Level 300), and three were in their senior year (Level 400). Participants were recruited with the help of two faculty members at the local university in Ghana. The first author shared the flyers and study information with the two faculty members, who then shared them with students during student organization meetings. Interested participants later contacted the faculty members to register their interest. Participants’ names are replaced with Ps (e.g., P1) to protect their confidentiality.

Findings

The findings revealed that critical engagement of historical sites such as the slave dungeons in Ghana indicates that prisons were designed to persist the racialization project that aims at intergenerational subordination of persons of African descent. More specifically, the themes generated through critical analysis of the architectural design of the cells for persons of African descent and those of European descent (see Figure 2) reveal that (a) mass incarceration mirrors racial-slavery; (b) white innocence and Black criminality that shape contemporary notions of policing and mass incarceration of Blacks in the United States are historically and structurally predefined; and (c) racism drives how justice is conceptualized and implemented.

Discussion

Previous research has linked mass incarceration of Black/African Americans to racialized slavery (M. Alexander, 2020; Gilmore, 2000; Martinez et al., 2023; Rigby & Seguin, 2021; G. Ward et al., 2021). While the current study supports existing literature, it highlights the role of heritage sites of slavery as a critical source of data to visualize the historicity and evolution of structural racism (white supremacy) and its continuing consequences. As noted by collective cultural trauma framework (J. C. Alexander, 2013; Eyerman, 2022; Eyerman et al., 2017), the invented racial hierarchy during the 1600s to justify slavery in the service of white supremacy that demanded persons of European descent to relate to persons of African descent as sub-humans altered the social and communal bonds among masses of Europeans, enslaved Africans, and members of the Native tribe (M. Alexander, 2012; Battalora, 2013). The fact that mass incarceration mirrors the historical racialized ideas today indicates collective cultural trauma. Sub-Saharan Africa was a central context in the design and institutionalization of the race-based hierarchy that has entrenched white supremacy to drive mass incarceration of Blacks/African Americans in the United States today (Asare, 2019). Slavery heritage sites, such as the slave dungeons in Ghana, serving as sites of memory, power, and control can illuminate our understanding of how the racialized ideas can be visualized and how it has evolved into today’s mass incarceration as well as ways to disrupt it continuity.

As participants noted, the structure and conditions of the cell where the enslaved Africans were imprisoned dictated that one is permanently cut off from life (denied ventilation, light, food, relationship, freedom, etc.) which led to their premature death. Although the exact conditions that characterized the enslaved may not be imposed on the many of the Black individuals incarcerated today, the policies, practices, and structures that shape the experiences of many individuals within the carceral system, majority of whom are Blacks, lead to permanent exclusion from society. This slow painful death that the current study highlights as embedded in the experiences of the enslaved Africans at the dungeons is what M. Alexander (2012) captures to describe Blacks with felony records in terms of their exclusion from mainstream society today. These experiences can be indicated by denial of jobs, housing, education, voting rights, and, especially, the social stigma that strips many incarcerated individuals their humanity:

If you were not allowed to participate in the political system, if you were not even eligible for food stamp or welfare and could be denied housing assistance. Yet, as bad as these forms of discrimination are, many ex-offenders will tell you that the formal mechanisms of exclusion are not the worst of it. The shame and stigma that follows you for the rest of your life. That is the worst. It is not the denial of the job but the look that flashes across the face of a potential employer when he notices “the box” has been checked—the way he suddenly refuses to look you in the eye. It is not merely the denial of the housing application but the shame of being a grown man who has to beg his grandmother for a place to sleep at night. (pp. 161–162)

The narrative is that all the enslaved Africans who were thrown into the condemned cell (left side of Figure 2) died there. While today incarcerated people may not physically die while in jail, upon release, because of the felony label, they are likely to experience social and psychological isolation. Even the debt bondage that released individuals are expected to pay when they are working a low paying job, as described in the New Jim Crow by M. Alexander (2012), are forms of suffering that keep these individuals in bondage, which can deepen their isolation to increase their premature death. Furthermore, without a critical exploration of the historical and structural context, mass incarceration of Black individuals could mean that Black individuals are predisposed to committing crimes compared to white individuals. However, as revealed by a participant “If this structure[the condemned cells] was there before America got its independence and then after its independence you have the same parallel existing, it means that for all intents and purposes they needed to maintain what they were doing here over there,” White innocence and mass incarceration of Blacks have a historical and structural undercurrent.

From the perspective of collective cultural memories/trauma (J. C. Alexander, 2013), this understanding suggests that the contemporary understanding of Blacks’s disposition to criminal behavior as opposed to that of whites is a structural and cultural stigma built into our psych through racial slavery. Our ability to critically explore the history of racial slavery and reinterpret it is key to deconstructing the way Blacks have been culturally viewed as synonymous with crime. As contended, “if traumas can be re-imagined and re-presented, the collective identity will shift. There will be a searching re-remembering of the collective past, solidarity can be expanded, and much needed civil repairs can be made” (J. C. Alexander, 2016, p. 95).

The current study also suggests that structural racism that is built into the foundation of society, operates through its institutions (e.g., housing, education, prison, and police), and are mechanized through individual actors who inhabit these institutions (Feagin, 2020; Young, 2011). Racialized institutions, although they function to orient the individual actors who inhabit them to exert the effects of racism, also operate outside of individual actors (Rosa & Díaz, 2020). Therefore, without structural reconfiguration of our institutions from the template modeled after racial slavery, the criminal justice system and its various institutions will continue to operate in ways that disproportionately disadvantage Blacks. While individuals who inhabit institutions such as the police, the court, and the legal system need to be aware of the cultural and racial biases, it is more important for them to understand the historical and structural roots of such biases and the pathways these individuals come to embody and transmit these racial biases on their historically designed targets (who tend to be mostly racialized minorities, especially Blacks). Our findings thus provide a context for understanding the present by showing that the present is the continuity of history (we cannot understand today without history, and without a better understanding of today, we miss the opportunity to reimagine the future).

Furthermore, the current findings suggest that heritage sites of slavery such as the slave dungeons in Ghana (and sub-Saharan Africa) are constitutive of data that can help us understand mass incarceration and other forms of racialized violence to imagine a just future (Samuels, 2019). In discussing the potential link between the reasons (resistance to enslavement, and deterrents to more forms of resistance) by which enslaved Africans were sent to the condemned cell compared to the reasons for the white soldiers, participants argued that in a racialized system, how justice is defined and administered upholds white supremacy: When Whites misbehaved this is where they are kept. When the slaves also misbehaved this is also where they are kept but you realize that the conditions are different but the same act of disobedience. Our participants suggest that mass incarceration through the prison system is an important mechanism to understand how racial slavery has been modified to achieve the political and economic interest of the racial state (M. Alexander, 2012; Armour, 1997; Mills, 2017). Contemporary social and political structures, grounded in liberalism, that we may view as the causes of social problems such as mass incarceration may therefore be evolving consequences of the historically designed structures (Mills, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2014) like racial slavery (M. Alexander, 2012).

To excavate the dynamics and the operation of such structures as well as the pathways they evolve and disrupt them, heritage sites that contain edifices and narrative of history of racial slavery need to be engaged (Reid, 2022; Wellington, 2006, 2011). Heritage sites reflect a mirror by which society “holds up to itself, to understand itself, but especially to understand and manage social change” (pp. 123–124). Collective cultural framework through heritage sites can foster the mobilization of the forces (e.g., collective understanding, solidarities, motivation, and consciousness) that drive social change (J. C. Alexander, 2016). As the current findings reveal, heritage sites help to visualize and conceptualize power dynamics, conflict, and structures of dehumanization. They can also help us imagine and develop potential models and pathways to heal from past trauma that characterize society (Johnston & Marwood, 2017; Samuels, 2019). As depicted in Figure 2, and consistent with the literature, exploration of how the violence of white supremacy has evolved through slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and ongoing racism highlights processes by which racial hierarchization fosters racial group identity and establish group boundary that continue to shape the racialization project today (Smångs, 2016; G. Ward et al., 2021). One example is segregation in both residential and occupational settings, which render Black people as well as other marginalized racialized groups highly vulnerable to police brutality, harassment, economic and political subordination, impoverished health, and imprisonment (M. Alexander, 2012; C. M. Bailey, 2023; M. Ward, 2022; Wildeman & Wang, 2017; Williams et al., 2019).

Implications

The current findings suggest that critical consciousness around slavery from an Atlantic perspective is urgently needed to prepare current and future generations of our society to disrupt the persistence of structural and social violence rooted in the past. Most of our conversation around the impact of white supremacy in contemporary times has not paid adequate attention to the critical role of Africa as an important context not only to understand the historical and structural root and processes to it entrenchment, but also to theorize social justice-oriented action toward a transformative society. In particular, the role of the TST in altering indigenous institutions and practices and setting the stage for colonial racial project (Asare, 2019; Pierre, 2012; Shumway, 2018) which resulted in epistemic invasion and the embodiment of harmful colonial ideas, structures, and practices that are self-destructive (Fanon, 1963; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). The condemned cells (Figure 2), from which the current study was conceptualized, are part of the forts and castles used to incarcerate captive Africans prior to transport across the Atlantic. They are part of the collective memory of forced migration, detainment, enslavement, and resistance (Engmann, 2022). Approximately, 80 to 100 of such lodges, forts, and castles were constructed along the Guinea/Gold Coast in present-day Ghana dating as far back as the 15th century (Engmann, 2022). They offer visual display of how racial slavery practices uphold human hierarchization and are rooted in historical and structural construction of social conditions and how they endure across generations (Simko, 2021). Additionally, they offer opportunity for a deeper understanding of mass incarceration and with such understanding, potentially for generating ideas toward structural changes.

Social work practice is grounded in the person-in-environment context and suggests that human behavior must be assessed and intervened with an appropriate understanding of the context and the contextual forces that are critical to the persistence or disruption of the problem (Cornell, 2006; Kondrat, 2013; Weiss-Gal, 2008). In the case of mass incarceration, because it is networked with other systems of the racial state (e.g., education, housing, employment, and welfare benefits; M. Alexander, 2012), it impacts families and communities that social workers are most likely to work with.

In practice with families, practitioners have applied genogram as an assessment and fact-finding tool, and as a process in making meanings of the current pattern of reality through knowledge of historical and intergenerational processes (McCullough-Chavis & Waites, 2004; McGoldrick & Carter, 2005; Walton & Smith, 1999). Scholarship on intergeneration trauma suggests that the use of genogram from an ecosystemic framework may provide a comprehensive assessment of patterns of historical oppression and the intersection with contemporary manifestations of oppression (Goodman, 2013). We argue that social workers can apply the rationale behind the genogram to inform macro-level practice by excavating historical knowledge and data related to structural racism to develop a diagnostic mechanism that can position social workers to be effective in disrupting and dismantling mass incarceration. To be effective in assessing and designing prevention and intervention models that engender the needed changes, social workers need to understand the structural and historical roots. With such understanding, and informed by historical thinking, heritage practices like the social work of museum, and frameworks like collective cultural trauma, social work can creatively design intervention and prevention strategies such as trauma-drama, documentaries, storytelling, and reflective practices to engender collective compassion, empathy, moral responsibility, and solidarity for justice (J. C. Alexander, 2016; Silverman, 2010). Critical engagement with heritage sites such as the slave dungeons in sub-Saharan Africa or plantation sites can help us identify concealed data for effective assessment of structural racism such as mass incarceration to develop effective macro-level intervention. One of the ways to help social workers to do that is to experientially expose them to such historical and heritage sites to help them visualize the workings of structural forces in the construction of racial conditions and engage them to critically re-envision conditions and structures that uphold human dignity and advance social and racial justice.

Limitations

There are some limitations that must be noted. First, this study is part of a pilot project that sampled 11 participants from Ghana to explore the relevance of the history of TST to understanding contemporary inequalities (Kyere, 2024). The current findings must therefore be interpreted within this context. Second, the participants are Ghanaian college students. The perspectives of the sample participants may not directly relate to the experiences of African Americans in the United States today. However, upon introduction to the narratives surrounding mass incarceration today and experiential exposure to the form and structure of racial violence that has provided the template for understanding mass incarceration, participants were able to establish such striking parallels. The implication is that context that facilitates collective trauma construction related to TST and slavery can engender critical view of structural and historical roots of racism. Such consciousness can generate collective agency and solidarity toward the effective disruption of structural injustices including mass incarceration.

Furthermore, although the current ethnicization process in Ghana, blanketed by local customary practices, is grounded in the European racialization project (Pierre, 2008, 2012), the overt racialized violence that shaped the relationship between Europeans and Africans in Ghana during TST and the colonial era no longer exists in Ghana compared to the United States. Therefore, the data must be interpreted with caution when compared with individuals with proximity to mass incarceration in the United States. However, our findings suggest that people do not necessarily have to have direct experience to be able to conceptualize the reality of racial slavery and how it has been morphed into the current. Rather, our ability to creatively integrate historical data and memory processes into social science methodology can enhance our efforts to generate relevant data that can deepen our understanding of the mechanisms by which the unjust institutional structures and practices such as racial slavery continue to drive racial inequalities in the carceral system.