Hi, Dr. Bardes, thanks for coming on today.
Thank you so much for having me.
Your book opens by exploring this budding relationship between slavery, incarceration and policing in New Orleans before the Civil War. Explain a little bit about what was going on back then.
Right after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Louisiana slaveholders started perceiving clues of what they thought was about to be a massive slave uprising. They started believing that enslaved people were about to rise up collectively and murder slaveholders and declare independence. At the exact same moment that Louisiana slaveholders were growing terrified of a slave rebellion, they discovered a way to cultivate granular sugar at a commercial scale.
So, at this moment, they really felt trapped by this incredible contradiction. On one hand, they wanted to expand slavery — to harvest this economic opportunity presented by sugar. On the other hand, they were terrified of slave revolt.
The solution that Louisiana's slaveholders reached was to create a network of specialized, publicly-funded slave prisons where rebellious and resistant enslaved people would be brought and tortured into subjugation. This slave prison system was launched in 1805 and would remain in use right up to the U.S. Civil War.
In Louisiana, we talk a lot today about high incarceration rates. But your book shows that even before the Civil War, enslaved people were locked up, too, at incredibly high rates. Is that a little counterintuitive for some people?
It's very counterintuitive. After all, to incarcerate an enslaved person just fundamentally feels really redundant. Or maybe paradoxical, right? They don't have any freedoms to take away. Incarceration also meant that an enslaver didn't have access to the enslaved prisoner's labor. So, for all these really completely reasonable reasons, historians have assumed that the South didn't need to develop prisons until after Emancipation. But it simply wasn't true.
What scholars have missed is that in cities like New Orleans, and other major cities like Charleston, Mobile, Nashville and Memphis, authorities constructed massive slave prisons that were built exclusively for the confinement of enslaved people. And the incarceration rates in these institutions were absolutely astronomical.
I think what this shows — what we see when we look at the emergence of slave prisons in the very early 19th century — is that the development of prisons that exclusively targeted Black Americans, and sought to disproportionately confine Black Americans, that's as old in the American South as the development of prisons itself. And that history is deeply, deeply intertwined with the history of slavery. This relationship between race and the prison is much, much, much older than people have realized.
In addition to enslaved people, your book covers how back in the day, New Orleans was routinely jailing nonwhite sailors and workers who were actually free. Not just free people of color, but even citizens from other countries who were working on boats. How did that work and what did it mean?
On any given day, if you went inside the slave prison, about 10 to 15% of the prisoners would protest that they were not actually enslaved people, but that they were free Black sailors and steamboat workers from all over the world who had been seized by the New Orleans police and were being jailed on the legal fiction that they were fugitive slaves.
Free black sailors and steamboat workers were probably the most criminalized population in 19th-century America because slaveholders feared that these were very, very mobile people who could travel back and forth between free and enslaved communities, who could help fugitive slaves, who could transmit radical anti-slavery literature and dangerous anti-slavery ideas. So free black sailors were intensely, intensely criminalized and policed in antebellum America, even as these men and women protested that they could prove that they were legally free persons.
I think what this shows is that slaveholders used slave prisons as tools not only to confine legally enslaved people, but also as a technology for removing people who were deemed dangerous and unworthy of freedom, even if technically they were free.
Bring us into the present a bit. Your book is a close read of incarceration and policing in New Orleans long before and then after the Civil War. What can we learn from that time as we're looking at mass incarceration today?
Prisons are places where society figures out what type of violence is appropriate to inflict on its own members. I am not somebody who thinks that all prisons should be abolished and that prisons are unnecessary. I do think that there is an essential role for penalties in society. But I do think we should look carefully, and critically, at what types of violence we want to be inflicted on our neighbors.One of the things about prisons is that they take the violence inflicted on people deemed criminal offenders, and they hide that violence from the rest of us.
It's really important for me to recognize that slaveholders in the 1830s thought that their slave prison system was a rational, efficient, morally justified way to inflict torture on enslaved people. We tend to think of slaveholders as the embodiment of an irrational, chaotic, violently disorganized form of violence. But they didn't think of themselves that way. They thought of their slave prisons as part of a very rational, efficient, government-managed, sanctioned, humane prison system, even while at the same time those slave prisons were methodically torturing enslaved people by the hundreds each day.
By the same token, we owe it to ourselves as a democratic society to look at our own prison system with clear eyes and ask ourselves what types of violence are we comfortable with, and what types of violence have no place in our society.
