John K. Bardes challenges histories of incarceration in the United States in The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803–1930. On the one hand, scholars often date the origin of the present-day U.S. penal system to reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century, when ideas circulated the nation (but especially northern states) that criminals could be reformed during their confinement. For some scholars, the rise of the antebellum northern rehabilitatory prisons and asylums represents humanitarian progress in society’s treatment of criminals. For others, it represents the rise of a modern and subtle form of wage-worker discipline characteristic of the rise of capitalism. Whatever the interpretation, in conventional narratives, white southern elites, who clung to a supposedly pre-modern society beholden to slavery, were incapable of constructing penal systems that matched their northern counterparts. Reconstruction and the Jim Crow years were instead the birth years of the present-day prisons in the South. Southern prisons were legacies of the history of slavery, this “plantation-to-prison narrative” contends, and before the Civil War, they were either nonexistent, unimportant, or mere reliefs of their northern counterparts (6).
Bardes suggests a new narrative: the present-day prison system in the U.S. South is rooted in the history of slavery, though those in power adapted that system in response to threats to their racial power, especially the fear of slave rebellion, Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Focusing on New Orleans—where the immeasurable depths of the city’s archives provide a vast source-base—Bardes finds that the city created its police force and constructed its primary jail for the enslaved in response to the turbulent first decades of the nineteenth century. These were years when revolutionary rhetoric and thought circulated North America and the Caribbean and challenged existing hierarchies, especially that thought which emanated from Haiti, the independent Black nation born of slave rebellion. The police jail in New Orleans and the city’s police were the central elements of a system created in 1805, on the one hand to control the freedom and mobility of enslaved and free Black workers as well as white laborers, and on the other hand to transform resistant Black people into pliable and subservient property. When enslaved and free Black people went to jail in New Orleans, they often labored on public works projects. Bardes finds that New Orleans officials adapted the chain gang from the 1787 negrés de chaîne of Cap-Francais, Haiti. By the 1820s, English-speaking residents of the city had begun to refer to these captive, forced public laborers as chain gangs, a term still foreign to much of the United States into the 1840s. Chain gangs were crucial to public works projects, like levee construction and maintenance. White people went to jail too, though to preserve a semblance of racial superiority, authorities mandated they only perform indoor labor. During the antebellum years, when New Orleans’s economy boomed and when the city attracted large numbers of poor and landless white men, city authorities imprisoned these white men for vagrancy in record numbers.
Bardes devotes the majority of The Carceral City to the first half of the nineteenth century, but readers of The Civil War Monitor may gravitate toward Chapters 5 and 6, where he focuses on policing and incarceration in New Orleans during its occupation by the U.S. Army and during the Reconstruction years. During the war years, the slave penal system collapsed, but the army and local elites began to police Black laborers with antebellum vagrancy laws. The army hoped to compel formerly enslaved people to “free labor” and preserve order within the city. Former enslavers, who composed the city elite, hoped to reconstitute coerced labor and white supremacy. Unlike during the antebellum years though, African Americans were able to organize and protest their over-policing; they even won brief victories when a Freedmen’s Bureau official ordered his subordinates to ignore vagrancy laws in 1865 and when the 1868 state constitution invalidated existing vagrancy statutes. The statues returned by 1877 and, as Bardes describes in the final chapter, white politicians re-energized vagrancy laws during the first decade of the twentieth century. In outlining the transformations of vagrancy law in Louisiana during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow period, Bardes argues that historians should focus less on the temporary and controversial Black Codes of the early Reconstruction years and more on the ways that former enslavers adapted pre-existing laws and penal philosophies to the era of emancipation.
There is a lot at stake in The Carceral City. There is the historiographical contribution related to the origins of the incarceration system, of course, but Bardes argues that his research also has a lot to say about the nature of state power in slave states and the relationship between slavery and capitalism, not to mention the questions it raises about the present-day incarceration system and its compatibility with an interracial society supposedly built on freedom and justice. Like many present-day scholars of incarceration, Bardes finds continuity between the modern-day penal system and slavery. Bardes’ continuity, however, is nuanced, complex, and unexpected. As he writes, “there are several lines from slavery to mass incarceration, though they are not all straight” (243). According to him, it is less effective to claim that present-day prisons systems replaced slavery than it is to say that slavery and prisons have shaped one another in a variety of complex ways. This review merely scratches the surface of Bardes’s contributions. The Carceral City is an important and careful history of slavery, freedom, and incarceration in the United States—one that challenges existing narratives about the relationship between American slavery and American imprisonment.
Dr. William Jones is a lecturer in the Department of History at Sam Houston State University.
