New data confirm that African American convicts partly replaced slave labor in the US

The large overrepresentation of African Americans in the US prison population can be traced back to the institutions that emerged after the abolition of slavery. Using new data from prisons records and historical census, a study from the University of Gothenburg confirm that the high levels of incarceration in the US started, at least in part, due to labor scarcity in which African American convict labor was used to replace slave labor.In her PhD dissertation in economics Melissa Rubio, researcher at the School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, explores how the large