Searching for Jane Crow

Argues that mass incarceration is slavery's legacy and exposes today's penal system where structural racism and state sanctioned violence keep Black women contained.

For centuries, Black women have experienced extreme rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the nation's jails and prisons. Thousands of enslaved and free African American women were held captive in private slave jails, public jails, and antebellum prisons. Today, Black women continue to overpopulate the criminal (in)justice system. While The New Jim Crow furthers our understanding of mass incarceration, it focuses on a Black male perspective. Searching for Jane Crow is the first book to trace the history of Black women and mass incarceration and powerfully maps slavery's legacies.

Historian Talitha LeFlouria tells the stories of Black women and mass incarceration from behind the walls of jails, prisons, infirmaries, solitary confinement cells, and death row, showing their remarkable resilience. Drawing on three centuries of testimonies, archival documents, and contemporary interviews with formerly incarcerated women, it chronicles Black women's experiences with the US criminal (in)justice system and the factors that have defined it since its inception. The book exposes today's penal system where structural racism, systemic discrimination, and state sanctioned violence coalesce into keeping Black women contained. Trailblazing and ambitious, Dr. LeFlouria's book will transform how we think about mass incarceration. Talitha L. LeFlouria is the Lisa Smith Discovery Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of the multi award-winning Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). She is a scholar of African American history and a specialist on Black women, mass incarceration, and the legacies of American slavery. Dr. LeFlouria has received several prestigious awards for her research, including a 2018-2020 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.