Bad Roads: Building and Using a Carceral Landscape in the Plantation South.

This article examines the public roads of the plantation South as central to the carceral landscape of slavery, highlighting their role in organizing plantation space, facilitating coerced labor, and enforcing racialized policing. The author argues that roads, built and maintained largely by enslaved people, not only delineated plantation boundaries but also functioned as tools of governance, restricting mobility and exposing fugitivity while blurring public and private power. By framing roads as pivotal to the infrastructural and carceral mechanisms of slavery, the article offers a nuanced understanding of how enslaved labor and state power intersected to sustain a system of captivity and control embedded in the physical and legal landscape.