Slave Rebellions and the Making of the Modern Prison

How slave rebellions influenced lawmakers as they shaped the legal traditions that led to the modern prison

The violence of American slavery is often remembered for its excesses. Slave Rebellions and the Making of the Modern Prison adds a more chilling dimension, revealing how the violence of slavery was often deliberate, calculated, and lawful. From Barbadian sugar plantations in the seventeenth century to the South Carolina Penitentiary at the turn of the twentieth, state officials wrote racial violence into law and empowered white men of wide-ranging statuses to police Black people. In doing so, they navigated grim questions: What kind and degree of racial violence should law codify? Who would enact that violence? According to what logic and whose interests would law legitimate that violence? The question of racial violence sparked debates that only law could mediate and yielded answers that only law could legitimate.

Yet lawmakers and enslavers are only half of the story. Free and enslaved Black people rebelled—and lawmakers used those rebellions to shape their cruel –but careful understanding of legal violence. Black liberatory struggles, though brutally crushed and cut tragically short, forever changed the world around them. Across more than two hundred years of colonial and state development, moments like the Stono Rebellion and Vesey Rebellion generated ideas of race and criminality that endure today. Resistance and rebellions deeply influenced lawmakers as they shaped the legal traditions that gave way to the modern prison. Sean Kim Butorac shows how slave rebellions were integral to the making of the American criminal legal system and sheds new light on its racist origins.