Policing Freedom
Illegal Enslavement, Labor, and Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Explores the transformation of punishment in ninteneeth-century Brazil and its intersection with changes in labor relations in the Atlantic World.

Martine Jean (Author)

9781009289115, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 August 2023

366 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.68 kg

'… the book is an essential read for scholars interested in the connection between punishment and work in the Brazilian legal experience of the 19th century …' Marjorie Carvalho de Souza, Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History

Policing Freedom uses the case study of Brazil's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção, to explore how the Brazilian government used incarceration and enforced labor to control the prison population during the foundational period of Brazilian state formation and postcolonial nation building. Placing this penitentiary within the global debates about the disciplinary benefits of confinement and the evolution of free labor ideology, Martine Jean illustrates how Brazil's political elites envisioned the penitentiary as a way to discipline the free working class. While participating in the debates about the inhumanity of the slave trade, philanthropists and lawmakers, both conservative and liberal, articulated a nation-building discourse that focused on reforming Brazil's vagrants into workers in anticipation of slavery's eventual demise, laying the racialized foundations for policing and incarceration in the post-emancipation period.

Introduction. The rogues' gallery
1. The politics of slavery, race, nation, and prison building
2. Confinement, labor, and citizenship
3. Prison labor and the politics of slavery
4. Disciplining children and engendering racialized citizenship
5. Adelino Mwissicongo and the afterlife of emancipation
Conclusion. Slavery's punitive afterlife
Appendix.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]