Melanie Newport (MN): Can you tell me a bit about the big idea of The Carceral City?
John Bardes (JB): For a long time, popular accounts of mass incarceration have argued that prisons and police only emerged in the South after slavery’s destruction during the Civil War. They’ve stated that racialized incarceration emerged as a way of “replacing” slavery or re-creating the racial control that slaveholders had previously maintained.
My book argues that that narrative is wrong. In fact, in parts of the slave South, enslaved people were arrested at astronomically high rates and were systematically imprisoned and forcibly worked through advanced networks of specialized slave prisons. In particular, in New Orleans, which is the focus of my book, enslaved people before the Civil War were actually incarcerated at far higher rates than freed people after the Civil War, or Black Americans today. In other words, mass incarceration as we know it is not a new phenomenon, and this complicated relationship among race and violence and slavery is as old as the American prison itself.
MN: One of the analytical tools you use to really great effect in the book are arrest and incarceration rates. There is an amazing chart from 1820 to 2020 showing the highs and lows of incarceration in New Orleans. We see that right at the edge of the Civil War, slaveholders put their slaves in jail on purpose, as a kind of safekeeping of their property.
That part was wild to me, because it shows that the Jim Crow era—typically considered an apex of racialized mass imprisonment—was actually a low point for jailing in New Orleans!
In the book, you find that major arbiters of that system were slave-owning lawmakers. Can you talk a bit about those folks and why they were so important to the development of the prison? I don’t know that I ever really sat with the idea that slaveholders were actually some of our most important penal theorists.