The carceral city : slavery and the making of mass incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 / John K. Bardes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bardes, John K., author.

Contributor:

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Imprisonment--Louisiana--New Orleans--History.

Imprisonment.

Prisons--Louisiana--New Orleans--History.

Prisons.

Mass incarceration--Louisiana--New Orleans--History.

Mass incarceration.

Slavery--Louisiana--New Orleans--History.

Slavery.

Criminal justice, Administration of--Louisiana--New Orleans--History.

Criminal justice, Administration of.

Discrimination in criminal justice administration--Louisiana--New Orleans--History.

Discrimination in criminal justice administration.

New Orleans (La.)--Race relations.

New Orleans (La.).

Race relations.

Louisiana--New Orleans.

Genre:

History

Physical Description:

x, 416 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2024]

Summary:

"Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action. Authorities built massive slave prisons and devised specialized slave penal systems to maintain control and maximize profit. Indeed, in New Orleans--for most of the past half-century, the city with the highest incarceration rate in the United States--enslaved people were incarcerated at higher rates during the antebellum era than are Black residents today. Moreover, some slave prisons remained in use well after Emancipation: in these forgotten institutions lie the hidden origins of state violence under Jim Crow. With powerful and evocative prose, Bardes boldly reinterprets relations between slavery and prison development in American history. Racialized policing and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age, but these crises are not new: slavery, the prison, and race are deeply interwoven into the history of American governance"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

The problem of incarceration in the age of slavery

A line of demarcation in punishments : slavery and the penitentiary movement, 1820-1861

Soi-disant libre : travelers of color, free status, and the slave prison

Idle and dangerous : poor white workers, freedom's limits, and vagrancy law

From marronage to vagrancy : policing freedom in wartime Louisiana, 1862-1865

We are all vagrants : reconstructing police power, 1865-1877

Aftershocks of marronage : labor coercion in the Jim Crow city.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-400) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

ISBN:

9781469678177

1469678179

9781469678184

1469678187

OCLC:

1402018140