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BLACK HISTORY MONTH
What we take for granted about the history of incarceration.
By
n The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803–1930, historian John Bardes recounts how Southern slaveowners relied on publicly funded urban jails to discipline, torture, and break enslaved people. It’s a shocking finding, as Bardes reveals that rates of incarceration for Black people were higher during the Civil War than they are today. But the book also shows, with great care, how the intimacy of enslavement fueled incarceration in Southern “police jails.” By sending slaves there, Southern slaveholders distanced themselves from the violence it took to dehumanize people who were already viewed as chattel. In doing so, Bardes finds, these slaveholder penologists understood that enslaved people were human.
Bringing to bear the perspectives of enslaved people and free Black people through their letters, Bardes shows that this system of carceral violence criminalized all Black people and was foundational in shaping Black experiences of work, public space, and migration in early America. To me, The Carceral City opens up an incredible set of possibilities for early American carceral history. It was a treat to talk with John Bardes, an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University whose work has been published in Journal of African American History, American Quarterly, Journal of Southern History, and Southern Cultures, and my coeditor on the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History
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