Imagine a system of imprisonment so calculating and so brutal that historians are still fiercely debating whether it was actually worse than chattel slavery. In this episode of pplpod, we conduct a structural archaeology of David Oshinsky’s 1996 masterpiece, Worse Than Slavery. We unpack the "Plantation Mutation," analyzing the transition from the Antebellum South to the convict lease system at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, famously known as Parchman Farm. We explore the mechanical "Disposability Paradox," where the perverse financial incentive to keep an enslaved person alive was replaced by an endless supply of replaceable humans under Jim Crow vagrancy laws. By examining the book’s unconventional "Jazz-like" structure—dedicating 50 percent of th ...