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 penitentiaries.”
JF: Why do we need to read The Carceral City?
JB: Racial criminalization and mass incarceration are among the gravest moral crises of our age. These crises are not new. We cannot fully understand the history of the American policing, the origins of mass incarceration, or the criminalization of Black Americans in the twenty-first century without first unpacking the policing and prison systems developed by slaveholders for the specific needs of slave societies.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
JB: As a little kid I had a very rich, imaginative interior life. I was also obsessed with classical mythology – Greek, Egyptian and Norse myths were my bedtime stories – and the ways that those stories sought to create meanings, articulate societal values, and explain life’s mysteries. For me, being a historian is a continuation of that storytelling urge.
JF: What is your next project?
JB: My next book project is about a series of brutal attacks and expulsions, aimed at free Black steamboat workers, that swept the Mississippi river valley in 1841. These attacks erupted simultaneously in virtually every riverport, from New Orleans to Cincinnati. They were triggered by rumors that free Black steamboat workers were plotting imminent slave insurrections and transporting fugitive enslaved people to freedom. Narrating through this crisis, my book chronicles the real ways that Black workers subverted the slave system, and helped forge a vernacular Black politics, by disseminating radical antislavery thought, transmitting news and information, and building connections between distant Black communities.
JF: Thanks, John!