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

This article discusses the findings of a pilot study engaging Ghanaian college students about the relevance of the legacies of the race-based transatlantic slave trade and enslavement to understanding mass incarceration. Participants ( N = 11; mean age: 22.3; 55% male, 45% female) explored parallels between captured Africans’s conditions at the slave dungeons in Ghana, and the mass incarceration of Blacks in the United States. Dialogues were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using the Sort and Sift, Think and Shift (SSTS) analytic approach. Findings suggest that critical engagement of the enslaved Africans’s incarcerated conditions reveals that (a) mass incarceration mirrors the race-based slavery, (b) white innocence and Black criminality is historically and structurally predefined, and (c) structural racism drives justice construction. Social workers can extend the use of genogram to access historical knowledge toward racism’s disruption and structural repair.