The Author’s Corner with John K. Bardes

John K. Bardes is Assistant Professor of History at Louisiana State University. This interview is based on his new book, The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). JF: What led you to write The Carceral City? JB: For several years I taught high school and elementary school in New Orleans.  As a teacher I was deeply disturbed by the ways that my students seemed criminalized by society, how conversations about crime served as veiled proxy for conversations about race, and the extent to which the criminal justice system invaded their lives and curtailed their options.  I wanted to understand how racial criminalization had developed, because I believed (and still believe) that we need to understand the history of a social problem in order to solve it.  JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of The Carceral City? JB: Popular accounts of mass incarceration argue that prisons and municipal police only emerged in the South after the abolition of slavery, as slavery’s “replacement.”  This narrative is wrong: in parts of the slave South, enslaved people were arrested at astronomical rates and jailed within specialized, publicly funded “slave...