The Carceral City

“John K. Bardes’s comprehensive monograph . . . complicates the prevailing scholarly narrative about the relationship between slavery and incarceration, insisting that the two were mutually constitutive. . . . [E]ssential reading for understanding the historical roots of the carceral state . . . [and] the continued criminalization, imprisonment, and dehumanization of incarcerated Black people throughout the United States.”—North Carolina Historical Review

“Scholars and students in a plethora of fields will benefit from John K. Bardes’s outstanding book The Carceral City. Superbly researched and written, this study contends that the nation’s carceral crisis is more than two centuries in the making, with origins long predating the Jim Crow era.”—American Historical Review

“A remarkably well researched and insightful study. . . . The Carceral City elicits fundamental questions about the function of policing and imprisonment, about the dynamics between class and race, and about the relationship between the traditional and the modern. . . . A rich book and a valuable contribution to the histories of both slavery and criminal justice.”—Journal of Southern History

“Exceptionally well written, both smart and smooth. Although a history of Louisiana institutions, it is far more engaging, through its use of primary sources, than the bulk of the scholarship on punishment and incarceration.”—Jeff Forret, Lamar University

“Bardes’s book is poised to make an important contribution to our understanding of criminal justice, state formation, and slavery—and how they related to each other. With so much of the work on American mass incarceration focused on the twentieth century, The Carceral City will shift our focus back to the nineteenth century, when the first of what Bardes calls two eras of mass incarceration occurred.”—Adam Malka, University of Oklahoma