Slavery and the origins of Louisiana’s prison industry, 1803-1861
Date
2017
Authors
Birch, Kelly
Editors
Advisors
Buchanan, Thomas
Prest, Wilfrid
Prest, Wilfrid
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Thesis
Citation
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
Abstract
This thesis examines the role that chattel slavery played in shaping a system of for-profit incarcerations in Louisiana between 1803 and 1862. In doing so, it challenges the conventional historical narrative of American penal development, which identifies the origins of the prison industrial complex in the decades following the abolition of slavery in the United States. Scholars have already contended that the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude ‘except as a punishment for crime’, facilitated the constitutional reinstitution of enslavement in American corrections systems. This thesis reveals that this relationship between slavery and imprisonment extends back further. It argues that, in pre-Civil War Louisiana, chattel slavery and the prison were mutually reinforcing institutions, and each, being market-oriented, shaped the other. In its exploration of this relationship, this thesis contributes to the history of penal reform and imprisonment, and to the history of American slavery. It also joins the history of the state with that of early American capitalism. To tell this story, this thesis incorporates new interpretations of sources used in previous studies (for example, Supreme Court records, census returns, and runaway slave advertisements), with insights gleaned from new types of primary material, such as jailers’ log books, receipts, and financial accounting records. This thesis begins in the decades following the U.S. Purchase of 1803, as Louisiana transitioned from a European colony to an American state. During this time, penal reforms gradually led to the replacement of an array of public corporal punishments with a system of mass incarceration that would ultimately fuse Enlightenment-inspired ideals with the moneymaking imperatives of the market revolution. Opening in 1835, a new state penitentiary complex in Baton Rouge, together with an expansive network of rural parish prisons, police jails, and urban workhouses, was deployed by local law enforcement agencies and slaveholders for the control and discipline of enslaved men, women, and children. But even while the state’s penal system served both public justice and private slaveholder rule, incarcerations’ costs mounted. And in the aftermath of a transatlantic panic in 1837, as the Lower Mississippi Valley plunged into financial depression, a demand for institutional economy steered Louisiana’s prisons into the free market. Beset by market shifts and fluctuations in labour and commodity prices, jailers and state authorities saw an economic solution to incarcerations’ costs in the uniquely fungible condition of enslaved prisoners. They capitalised on this in grim ways. Keepers of crowded, filthy prisons collected fees for confining, punishing, and selling African American inmates. Many also pressed inmates into labour in prison factories and state-sponsored chain gangs. In the latter, enslaved prisoners built the infrastructure that supported Louisiana’s commercial expansion. But as the prison emerged as an important centre of economic production, it was also transformed into a site of struggle, as African American inmates resisted the double burden of enslavement and incarceration.
School/Discipline
School of Humanities : History
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2018
Provenance
This electronic version is made publicly available by the University of Adelaide in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. This thesis may incorporate third party material which has been used by the author pursuant to Fair Dealing exceptions. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material you wish to be removed from this electronic version, please complete the take down form located at: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/legals