Creating Crime, Framing Criminals: Incarcerating the Enslaved, Freed Persons, and Immigrants in São Paulo's House of Correction, 1854–88

This paper examines the incarceration of enslaved, freed persons, and European immigrants in São Paulo’s House of Correction in the second half of the nineteenth century. Conceived as a modern penitentiary, the institution aimed to reform “criminals” through labor, silence, and solitary confinement, promising a higher moral standard than the city’s overcrowded, unsanitary public jail. Inspired by European notions of modernity, prison reform, and rehabilitation, the House of Correction nonetheless operated in a society where slavery remained fundamental until 1888. The end of the transatlantic slave trade posed a pressing question for São Paulo authorities and slaveowners: how to secure a new labor force for the province’s expanding coffee economy. While slavery remained legal for another 38 years, authorities increasingly introduced indentured labor practices using poor, free European immigrants. Amid gradual emancipation through manumission laws, the growth of interprovincial slave trade, and the expansion of immigration service contracts, incarceration and labor imprisonment became mechanisms of coercion to control enslaved, freed, and immigrant populations roaming São Paulo’s streets. Through the legal language of idleness and vice, the empire created criminal categories that framed specific segments of the population as dangerous or unproductive. Individuals seen as lacking religion, discipline, instruction, residence, and/or free status were coerced and compelled to labor within a modern carceral institution whose reform project was ultimately void. By exploring the tenuous boundaries of freedom and layered captivity, this paper analyzes how slavery, fractured systems of “free” labor based on dependence, and the modern penitentiary mutually shaped one another.