About

John Clegg is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has been serving since 2024. Prior to this, he was a Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney during 2023-2024 and a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago from 2018 to 2022. His research interests encompass economic history, political economy, the economics of crime and punishment, and stratification. He has received several fellowships and awards, including the W. E. B. Du Bois Fellowship at Harvard University, a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Economic History at Lund University, and the Harper-Schmidt Fellowship at the University of Chicago. His work has been supported by various grants, notably in areas such as Swedish criminal justice history, slavery insuring practices, emancipation, and digital humanities projects related to freedom and incarceration. John Clegg has contributed to scholarly discourse through numerous publications on topics like the legacy of slavery, mass incarceration, and the economic origins of punishment and social stratification. His research combines historical analysis with contemporary issues in criminal justice and economic inequality, making significant contributions to understanding the intersections of history, economics, and social policy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Sociology
• Neoclassical economics
• Law
• Economic system
• Medicine
• Philosophy
• Geography
• Social psychology
• Criminology
• Economic growth
• Demographic economics
• Market economy
• Labour economics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• The Racial Politics of Mass Incarceration

  Perspectives on Politics · 2025-10-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Many argue that America’s punitive turn was the result of racial backlash to the Civil Rights Movement. Yet some have noted support among black people for the policies attributed to this backlash, citing the influence of rising crime on black voters and politicians. In this article we gather new evidence and examine what it implies. Public opinion data show that not just the white but also the black public became more punitive after the 1960s. Voting data from the House show that most black politicians voted punitively at the height of concern about crime. In addition, an analysis of federally mandated redistricting suggests that in the early 1990s, black political representation had a punitive impact at the state level. Together, our evidence suggests that crime had a profound effect on black politics. It also casts some doubt on the conventional view of the origins of mass incarceration.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• David Greenberg on prison abolition, an interview by John Clegg

  Punishment & Society · 2024-11-06

  article1st authorCorresponding

  David Greenberg, who passed away in July 2024, was a pioneer of radical criminology as well as polymath who excelled in several disciplines, including physics, history, and mathematical sociology. In November 2022, I spoke with David about some research I was doing into the history of prison abolitionism in the United States. David had been the author of “The Problem of Prisons,” a pamphlet written in 1969 which was one of the first sustained arguments for prison abolition to have been published in the post-war United States. He also edited and was a main contributor to The Struggle For Justice, a coauthored book published in 1971 by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). This book would become a key reference in the emerging field of radical criminology and would influence early Quaker prison abolitionists like Fay Honey Knopp and Ruth Rittenhouse Morris, as well as later abolitionist groups like Critical Resistance. In his later writings, however, David was critical of prison abolitionism. 1 I was curious about how and why his views changed, so I sat down with him in a Greenwich village cafe and recorded our conversation. The following is an edited transcript of that recording.

  PublisherDOI

• Slavery’s Carceral Legacy

  American Journal of Sociology · 2024-11-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A burgeoning social scientific literature on the place-based legacy of slavery has mostly overlooked the effect of slavery on incarceration, despite the fact that the intensity and racial disparity of US incarceration is often attributed to its history of slavery. I analyze data on incarceration from 1840 to 2020 and show that the historic prevalence of slavery tends to be negatively associated with Black incarceration, especially under Reconstruction and Jim Crow (1870–1940). In line with recent work by Christopher Muller, I argue this is partly explained by white planters paying the fines of Black convicts, who would then have to work off the debt or suffer imprisonment. I conclude that the existing literature is not wrong to assume that Southern incarceration was shaped by slavery. But it shaped it in surprising ways that previous work has often failed to identify.

  PublisherDOI

• Punishment in Modern Societies: The Prevalence and Causes of Incarceration Around the World

  Annual Review of Criminology · 2023-08-08 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The literature on the prevalence and causes of punishment has been dominated by research into the United States. Yet most of the world's prisoners live elsewhere, and the United States is no longer the country with the world's highest incarceration rate. This article considers what we know about the prevalence and causes of incarceration around the world. We focus on three features of incarceration: its level, inequality, and severity. Existing comparative research offers many insights, but we identify methodological and theoretical shortcomings. Quantitative scholars are still content to draw causal inferences from correlations, partly because (like qualitative scholars) they are often limited to studying the present and the developed world. More data will allow better inferences. We close by defending the goal of building precise and generalizable theories of punishment.

  PublisherDOI

• Labor markets and incarceration: The China shock to American punishment

  Criminology · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Demographic economics

  Abstract Studies have failed to show a positive effect of unemployment on incarceration despite reasons to expect such a relationship. We note that prior estimates have been muddied by the absence of substate data, a focus on prisons rather than on jails, limited measures of unemployment, and the fact that the health of the labor market is endogenous to incarceration. We instrument for local exposure to the rise of Chinese exports (“the China Shock”) to estimate the effect of job loss on American incarceration. Marshaling a new data set of prisoners and jail inmates by race at the commuting zone level, we show that negative shocks to local labor markets led to significant increases in total incarceration rates for both Blacks and Whites. The effect seems to be driven by increased prison rather than jail populations. This estimate is invisible to ordinary least squares, which may help explain null results reported by past work. Counterfactual exercises suggest that the effect of job loss was punitively consequential. Had employment gains from the 1990s been preserved into the 2000s, the U.S. incarceration rate would have grown significantly less than it did.

  PublisherDOI

• Reifying Racism: A Response to Norton and Stein

  2021-09-10 · 2 citations

  report1st authorCorresponding

  John Clegg and Adaner Usmani respond to Norton and Stein's critique of their analysis of the rise of mass incarceration.

  PublisherDOI

• A Theory of Capitalist Slavery

  Journal of Historical Sociology · 2020 · 46 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Neoclassical economics
  • Political Science

  Abstract The relationship between slavery and capitalism has become a renewed topic of debate, yet scholars have not been able to agree on a definition of capitalism. In this article I first clear up some misconceptions and situate the debate in the Marxian tradition from which it arose. I argue that while non‐Marxian accounts of capitalism fail to explain the key social transformations that have accompanied the rise of capitalism globally, Marxian accounts have failed to comprehend similar transformations that occurred on American slave plantations in the 19th century. I then present a general model of capitalism, building on earlier work by Brenner and Wood, that both incorporates and explains the distinctive dynamics of capitalist slavery in the antebellum South.

  PublisherDOI

• Three Agricultural Revolutions

  South Atlantic Quarterly · 2020 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Market economy

  Attempts to imagine a shift beyond capitalism often tend to fixate on the terms of the old socialist calculation debate: plan versus market. At its deepest level, though, capitalism is not fundamentally a matter of the distribution of goods, for underlying this is the possession of land. In thinking about the end of capitalism it is thus useful to return to the question of its origin as the second agricultural revolution in human history. If capitalism finds its roots in an agrarian transition, we might also locate its supersession at this level—in a third agricultural revolution.

  PublisherDOI

• Crisis and Immiseration: Critical Theory Today

  2018-01-01 · 10 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Racial Politics of Mass Incarceration

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Adaner Usmani

  Harvard University Press

  3 shared

• Rob Lucas

  1 shared

• Eric Cowsill

  1 shared

• Annalena Wolcke

  1 shared

• Sebastian Spitz

  Harvard University Press

  1 shared

• Duncan K. Foley

  1 shared

• Aaron Benanav

  Syracuse University

  1 shared

Education

• Phd., Sociology

  New York University

  2018

• MSc., Economics

  New School for Social Research

  2011

• MA, Philosophy

  University of Sussex

  2005

Awards & honors

• W. E. B. Du Bois Fellowship, Harvard University
• Postdoctoral Fellowship in Economic History, Lund University
• Harper-Schmidt Fellowship, University of Chicago
• Swedish Research Council Grant, 2023-25
• Insuring Slavery, National Science Foundation Science & Tech…