Why the Way We Understand the South Matters — Especially in Criminal Justice

This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters. Last month, members of The Marshall Project gathered in Atlanta with people from across the criminal justice system — public officials, advocates, academics and people directly affected by the system — for a series of conversations about the South and its place in the national criminal justice landscape as the country approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I was asked to offer brief remarks on why the South matters to national journalism, but to my mind, the larger question is why it matters how the country as a whole understands the South. That question feels especially urgent, coming amid a new struggle over political power in the region. Several southern states are moving to redraw Congressional districts in ways likely to dramatically dilute Black voting power, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. For this week’s newsletter, I wanted to share an adaptation of those remarks, which follows below: The easiest answer to why our understanding of the South matters is that it’s a huge part of the country. As the Census Bureau defines the region, the South is roughly 40% of the population. It’s home to more than half of Black America, and it’s also growing quickly. Between 2023 and 2024, the South added more people than all the other regions in the country combined. The South is also increasingly a crucible for national fights that are not merely Southern. Dobbs v. Jackson came out of Mississippi and changed abortion law for the entire country. Callais came out of Louisiana and sits at the center of the current fight over race, representation and the Voting Rights Act. If you’re thinking about law, politics, voting or justice in the U.S., you’re thinking about the South. So on one level, the answer is obvious: The South matters because people matter, and it’s home to a lot of people. In some sense, it’s almost an absurd question. Why wouldn’t 40% of a nation matter to a conversation about that nation? But it is, in fact, a necessary question. Because the institutions that narrate national life are not geographically distributed across national life. Public perception is shaped by proximity, including what the national media understands as normal, and where cultural authority tends to cluster — and on balance, that has never been in the South. I say all this as someone without any inherited Southern identity. I grew up in the Northeast, and I first encountered the South as an outsider — sometimes as a national reporter dropping into a place with a national question already in mind. I offer all of this humbly, as a non-expert whose understanding of the region changed through proximity. What has changed for me, after nearly a decade living in the region, is not that I discovered “the real South” at some barbecue, barbershop or juke joint. What has changed, rather, is that the South has become less symbolic and more specific. Before I spent real time living here, I had what I now recognize as a very Northern imagination of a place like Mississippi. That’s not to say an invented one. The history I associated with Mississippi — racial terror, civil rights struggle, poverty, plantations, prisons — is real. Those are not false associations to make. But they are incomplete things to know. And incompleteness, when it hardens, can become its own kind of falsehood. And that is how stereotypes often work. Many times, they are fragments of truth that become mistaken for the whole. I think that is one of the challenges of understanding the South from the outside. There is a seductive set of symbols to grab at, and they are powerful because they are attached to real things: cotton fields, prison farms, Confederate iconography, petrochemical corridors. But a symbol can be true and still be insufficient. Put another way: As we reflect on 250 years of this unfinished great experiment, I think it is a profound error to frame the South merely, or principally, as the repository of America's greatest sins. The legacy of those sins, of course, lives everywhere. From the Rhode Island coastline built on the wealth of the triangular slave trade, to Midwestern redlining, to Indian removal in the West, U.S. history is full of many such volumes, and they span from coast to coast. The South is, however, a place where many of America’s sins are most legible. And that is both an opportunity and a trap for how we understand our history. It is an opportunity because the South can help us see the country more clearly. If you want to understand mass incarceration, you need to understand Angola and Parchman prisons, in Louisiana and Mississippi, respectively. Not because they are exotic Southern aberrations, but because they make visceral the language of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, “except as punishment for crime.” Similarly, if you want to understand U.S. democracy, you need to understand Southern fights over voting rights — not because representation is only ever challenged in the South, but because the battles there often clarify the mechanisms of power and resistance. But this legibility can also be a trap, if it’s mistaken for simplicity. Because the symbols are so vivid, we can convince ourselves that we understand more than we actually do. The South can become flattened by contempt or by fascination. It can be treated as a symbol of backwardness, or of resistance — a symbol of authenticity, or a symbol of national guilt. But places are not symbols. They are systems. They are people moving through institutions. And that matters, especially in criminal justice. There is a moral impulse that you often hear in conversations about our criminal justice system — particularly among people interested in reform and in mercy — that a person is not the worst thing they have ever done. There’s a version of that for place: A place is not the worst thing that ever happened there, either. But the past is also always with us, the writer James Baldwin often cautioned. “It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history," he said in a 1980 speech. Those ideas do not contradict each other. Rather, they discipline one another. Baldwin reminds us that the past is never simply past. And that familiar adage on mercy and grace reminds us that history, even terrible history, is not the whole of a person — indeed, not the whole of a place. I see the work of making sense of the South, then, as a challenge to remember without reducing. To reckon without caricature. To see history as ever-present, without treating people or places as trapped forever inside the most violent or tragic chapter of the story. If we think about the South that way, we learn not just something about the South. We learn something about the nation.