Welcome And Why Prisons Matter

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a Guide to Caribbean History and Culture, hosted by me, Dr. Alexandria Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture. Hello everyone, Waguan, and welcome back to Strictly Facts, a Guide to Caribbean history and culture, where we explore the histories that shape the Caribbean and its global connections. Today's episode takes us into a part of Caribbean history that is often overlooked, but deeply revealing: the history of incarceration. When we think about prisons, we often think about crime and punishment, but in the context of the Caribbean and just, you know, generally colonial societies at large, prisons have long served another purpose, the control of labor. In this episode, we turn to British Guyana, or now modern day Guyana, to explore how the carceral system evolved in the aftermath of emancipation and alongside indentureship. As formerly enslaved people sought to distance themselves from plantation labor and redefine their lives, colonial authorities responded by expanding prisons, not simply for punishment, but to discipline, extract, and control labor in new ways. Through the experiences of incarcerated women, both Afro-descended and immigrant women, Dr. Estrene Adams' new upcoming book, Slavery Indentorship and Women's Labor, Early British Guyna's Jails, helps us to see how the lines between free and unfree labor were far more blurred than we often assume. Prisons became sites where labor could be coerced, monetized, and redeployed in service of colonial economies' interests, while ideas about race, gender, and criminality were actively restructured and enforced. This conversation invites us to rethink what freedom looked like in post-emancipation Caribbean societies and to consider how systems of incarceration were used to sustain colonial power long after slavery formally ended. Dr. Adams, it's so great to have you. Do let our listeners know a little bit more about yourself, where in the region is near and dear to you, and what inspired your interest in women's history, labor history, and incarceration.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Alexandria, thank you so much for having me this afternoon. I am currently based in Guyano because I'm Guyanese. I'm at the University of Guyana where I head the Department of History and Caribbean Studies. And um women's history, labor history, Caribbean history in general, of course, is near and very, very dear to me. I thought about women and about labor history for two particular reasons. We look at history, and a lot of times when we read the history books, it's always about men, especially in the early colonial period, either white men or men of color, but it's always predominantly about men, about men's labor, about men's punishment, about all of these different aspects of men. And oftentimes what men experience becomes, you know, a blanket for all experiences within the Caribbean um systems. And so what I wanted to do is to center women, focus on women, and not just relegate them to the margins of this history. Because as I did work and the more and more work that I did, what I realized is that women were central to a lot of the developments that were taking place within the Caribbean region, within Guyana. And so for too long, they have been on the margins of these discussions. They have been on the um periphery and not centered where they ought to be. And so I purposed it in my mind very early on when I started my work that I would not just be another historian. I would not just be another person just exploring the experiences of Caribbean

Centering Women In Caribbean History

SPEAKER_01 4:10

people in general, but more with a focus on Caribbean women because I felt that women ought to be centered in these stories that many times affected how they were able to navigate these systems within the region. And um labor history. When you think about labor history, you're asking about who's working, right? What kind of conditions are they working under? Who is profiting from this labor? And so you quickly get to the very heart of colonial societies where you start asking these questions because you realize who's working and who's benefiting. And then we see, you know, this other aspect of it, the one that I um focused on, which is incarceration. Because, like you said in your introduction, a lot of times when we think about incarceration, we don't always think about it, you know, through the lens of labor. We always think about it, you know, as crime and as punishment and these kinds of things. But there's this whole other aspect of incarceration and labor. When those two become interconnected or intertwined, you can't look up at one without looking at or thinking about the other because they're they're essentially extensions of each other.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

Certainly, certainly. I thank you for raising that because I think it also helps to situate my initial question for our recording today. You know, we've had conversations like this before in terms of the fact that many Caribbean societies have had multiple, or maybe at least more than one, rather, colonial powers in terms of our early histories. And so in the case of Guyana, Guyana was formerly a Dutch colony and then um a British colony. And you know, this then also gets into conversations of um labor because that shift not only you know undergirds the histories of enslavement um in the region, but then also gets a little bit more muddled and complicated once we understand enslavement to emancipation to indentured ship, right? And I think oftentimes we're maybe a little bit quick to summarize that moment. I think especially for the British colonies or what were formerly um the British colonies, we're quick to say, you know, emancipation 1834, apprenticeship period 1838, and all was right in the world, and I'm being facetious here, right? Um, but what we're sort of getting at and what is certainly the topic of your book is that these things become a little bit more complicated, especially again, then with the introduction of indentureship. And so could you speak to a little bit how, you know, this change in leadership is not the correct word, right? But coloniality rather, um, you know, impacts how for in Guyana's case, these histories of slavery, emancipation, and labor changed over time.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

Right. Um, so you mentioned that we were once a Dutch colony and then we became a British colony, but you um you missed an entire aspect of it where for a very short period of time we were a French colony, correct? But that's also true. During the Napoleonic Wars, um the French actually um took control of the colony for um for a couple of years before it went back to the Dutch and then to the British again. So we changed hands um quite a number of times. And they all had an impact on the way slavery unfolded, particularly slavery, because by the time we get to apprenticeship and abolition and um and indentureship, the colony would have been under British control for that period of time. But if if we look at the systems under the Dutch, all right, and if we take incarceration as an example, during the period of slavery, it's not that there wasn't a system of incarceration. There was, there was always um some form of penals um system within these um colonies. And under the Dutch, because it was the period of slavery, the power to punish freely rested in the hands of the plantation owners for the obvious reason because enslaved people were considered the property of the plantation owners, and therefore the plantation owner had the power to um punish his property. However, if the enslaved person committed like what they consider to be like a capital crime or something like that, then that fell under the um control of the colonial authorities. And so they had these workhouses that they developed. Capital crimes could be running away from the plantations or um, of course, murder and those kinds of things. If you kill a white person, if you if an enslaved person kill um a fellow enslaved person, that too was considered a capital um crime. But of course, the punishment was not equal as if you know you killed um a white person. But then you were sent to the colonial workhouse. The colonial workhouses at the time, though, were you know essentially for the free population, free people of color, as well as uh free whites, all right, especially debtors and sailors that were deserting and so on. You know, it was basically for them, because like I said, the plantation owner could punish the enslaved person for any um infraction that they committed on the plantation. And so within this period, this Dutch period of um colonization, the focus of the prison, or or I should probably re-um rephrase that to say this pre-emancipation period, all right, the focus of imprisonment, it was about punishment for whatever crime, perceived or otherwise, that you committed. All right. So you did something and they sent you to the workhouse or to the house of correction or whatever the term they were using at the time, they sent you there because you did that and you were going to be punished. And so what I try to show is that there were sentenced to periods of hard labor, but the hard labor that they were expected to perform, it was monotonous, um, non-productive labor. We're talking about things like turning a crank or walking the treadmill or something like that. All right, there was no benefit from that kind of labor other than to punish the person that committed that crime. Now, the thing about the the colony changing the hands from the Dutch to the British and so on. When the British signed articles of

Dutch Roots And Early Punishment

SPEAKER_01 11:05

capitulation, which gave them control of the of these Guyana colonies, we look at Guyana now as one country, but in the colonial period, it was actually three separate colonies: the colony of Demerara, the colony of Barbeese, and the colony of Esiquebo. And later on, um, in the early British period, they kind of merged Demerara-Esiquebo, so it was Demerara Esequebo and Barbeese. All right. And so when they signed the articles of capitulation to take these colonies, even though the British would have been the colonial authorities within the colony, the settlers or the colonists were still predominantly Dutch. So you have Dutch settlers, a couple of French settlers with British overlords. And so part of the agreement of the Articles of Capitulation was that the British will continue to maintain most of the Dutch colonial structures that had been implemented within the colony. So now you have British overlords governing a colony that is predominantly Dutch in terms of the settlers using the Dutch architecture that had already been in place. All right. And so that had an impact in the way that the colony was governed. So you will see certain differences if you compare, let's say, early again, a colony to like Trinidad or Jamaica or any other place, you will see certain differences because of the impact of the Dutch on the um on the colonial scene. All right. And so those early um prisons like the the New Amsterdam jail or um the the jail at the settlement in um at what they call Flag Island at the time, all of those were inherited from the Dutch. Those were systems that were inherited from the Dutch. And so they they promised them, they agreed that once they took over, they were going to maintain those systems. But then, of course, eventually they unified the colonies and they became um the unified colonies of British Guyano. And so what the British now try to do is start to kind of phase out some of those Dutch policies and those Dutch systems and try to now make it a more British kind of um system, more British kind of colony, all right. And so, of course, even up to apprenticeship, all right, emancipation, apprenticeship, the focus for these establishing these um jails and establishing these workhouses and so on, the focus was still to a very large extent with punishment. But then with full emancipation, that now changes because what happens with emancipation? They lost control of this unfree labor force that they had depended on for all of these hundreds of years, all right? You could no longer direct this labor as you wanted to, and so for a very short period of time, you know, um formerly enslaved people, free people, had a degree of autonomy where they could move themselves, they could decide who they want to work for, when they wanted to work, and of course that upset the colonial um system because the system as it was created depended upon a consistent labor force. Whether it was sugar, whether it was cotton, whether it was coffee, you needed a consistent labor force. And so emancipation kind of through what we see what we say in um in Guyana through a monkey range into that system. And so it didn't operate as smoothly as it had to um prior. And so freed people, of course, they were able to, you know, bargain for higher wages and so for a very short period of time, they enjoy this autonomy and they enjoy these um higher wages and so on. If you compare wages in Guyana to, let's say, um, the Auto Caribbean territories, I think the only Caribbean territory that paid higher wages in the post-emancipation period would have been um Trinidad, all right. And again, because of the size of the labor force. The labor force was very small, all right, uh, in comparison to um like a like Jamaica, all right, the the labor force was much larger um there because Jamaica is a much older colony than um, like say Trinidad and um and British Guyana. And so they were not about to allow that to happen. And of course, one of the ways of um disrupting this system and and regaining control of the system was through immigration and indentured. All right. So now you bring these indentured immigrants in and you flood the labor market, and so you drive the wages down, and then you force the um formerly enslaved people out of certain positions that they had um performed during the period of slavery and in that post-emancipation period. And now you have all of these immigrants that are able to work. But there's a problem. You have these immigrants, they're now coming into the system, and it takes them a while because remember, this is not a system that they are accustomed to, they have to be seasoned and all of that. And you have large, um, by then referred to as Creole population, and you have them there and they're deciding when they want to work and when they don't want to work and so on. And so you got to find a way of driving them back onto the plantation because over and over, as you read these documents, you you see the kind of language and the kind of narratives that they're that they're um putting forward, and they're saying plainly that the place of the formerly enslaved is on the plantation. And so if they thought about going anywhere else, because there were lots of options in Guyana just because of the mere size of the colony, all right. There was abundant land, and so a lot of these um formerly enslaved people, they ended up, you know, moving off of the plantation and they went and formed their own villages and that kind of thing, and they wanted to go into um peasant farming, but then the colonial masters they found ways and means of diverting them from that. So they would flood their um their their provision farms and so on. Some of them wanted to go into the interior to work in gold mining and so on. But there were these options that they did have, but the um colonial authorities and the plantocracy, they felt that the only place that these people should be is on the plantation. Hence my argument that the prison is one of the um means through which they could now divert this labor back to the plantation. Um, how did that work? In the case of immigration, immigration came with a series of ordinances and um legislation that made that system extremely rigid. The contract that the indentured immigrants signed is a civil document, all right? A labor contract between two parties. But the ordinances now criminalize that contract in the sense that if you violated certain aspects of this contract, then um it was a criminal violation, not a civil violation. And so your plantation owner could take you to court. So let's say, for example, um you left the plantation for a couple of days without seeking or receiving formal um

Emancipation Shakes The Labor Order

SPEAKER_01 18:55

leave, right? So you had to go and get a pass to leave, and you decide that, you know what, I'm not gonna because I've uh I've come across examples of there, there was this woman, this immigrant woman who she was on one plantation. It was a plantation called Ogle, and her daughter was on another plantation called um, I think Herstellin. And her daughter was ill, and she got news that her daughter was ill. And, you know, I mean, your daughter is ill. What are you going to do? And so she decided that she was going to go um go to the other plantation and and um, you know, look after her daughter and so on. And she was taken to court, and the magistrate found her guilty of leaving the plantation without um without a pass. And so she was fined, but uh she she she basically argued that she had already spent the little money that she had trying to get her daughter well, and so she didn't have money to pay the fine. And so, what was the alternative? She had to spend it was a fine, or I think it was 14 days um imprisonment, and so she obviously had to end up um being imprisoned because she couldn't afford to pay that fine, all right. And so what I found is that when these persons now were directed towards the prison, what happened to them? They weren't just in there performing, you know, pointless slavery tasks as they did previously, where they were, you know, walking the treadmill or cleaning the prisons or so. That's not what they were doing. Once you were sent to jails now, the plantation owner could now buy your labor from the jail authority. All right. Now they paid less for the labor. So if you were usually paid, you know, uh a dollar for a day's work on the plantation, they will buy your labor from the from the prison for 50 cents. All right. So you were paid less and you you you went you know to work on the plantation doing the same kind of labor that you would have done if you weren't in um incarcerated. But then it didn't stop there. When your 14 days of incarceration was over, then you went back to your original plantation. When you get back to your original plantation, before your contract came to an end, you had to work back that 14 days that you spent incarcerated for your original plantation owner. And so that's how the cycle. So they diverted them, kept the labor, paid less for the labor, and then you still got your free labor or the original labor that you were supposed to get. So this is how the system, you know, was designed to keep these people in this kind of um thing that, you know, had them interconnected. So the plantation, then I kind of argue, is that it was a connection, all right? It was a continuation or the prison was a continuation of the plantation because you had the same kind of regimented system um in both areas, all right. So you didn't escape the plantation when you got incarcerated, but you basically conducted. Continued that, right? In the case of the local population or the Creole population, it's the same thing. All kinds of new laws, vagrancy laws and petty thefts, and all these new laws implemented in the post-emancipation period. And so they're caught up in these kinds of things. And then, of course, you're sent to jail. And then they're using your labor, not necessarily on the plantations, but in um to perform all of these public works, projects that they're now having, building up roads, building of the seawall, working at all these government institutions. So all of this labor that they would have had to pay for is now performed for free by these people that are incarcerated.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Thank you for outlining that for us because I think it also sort of sets the scene for my next question. Um oftentimes I think the distinctions between enslaved labor and indentured labor are constituted as distinct things. And of course, as you've outlined, right, there are dimensions of both of them that are different. And centering these narratives of um incarcerated people, incarcerated women specifically, um, how does that complicate our understanding of freedom in the post-emancipation British Guiana period?

SPEAKER_01 23:24

Um, I guess the first question I would ask, you know, is freedom for whom and on whose terms, right? Because it was quote-unquote freedom in the sense that officially and legally slavery was abolished, that you could no longer um enslave people within the British Empire and of course within um British colonial Guyana, but the system still continued. And I argue that, you know, the prison was one of the iterations in which the system of enslavement continued, right? And as you alluded to, a lot of times when we when we talk about labor, we talk about it in in binary terms. So on the one hand, there is enslaved labor, and so you know that these people are in a system of enslavement, and so they're working for free, and that's it. And then on the other hand, we have um indentured immigrants coming in, and we agree that there was a level of coercion in how indentured immigrants um came, but you know, for the most part, they came of their own free will and they were paid, whether it was a lot or it was a little bit, they were paid for the labor that they performed. All right. And so, you know, that's nice and clean and neat, and we put that there, and you know, that's how we look at it. But when I started to um study the colonial prisons, I realized that it's not that nice, it's not that clean, it's not that neat, it's it's a lot more messy and it's a lot more complicated. And what I realized is that we cannot have these clear-cut distinctions between the system because the systems overlapped and they're interconnected and all of that because of um of this new ground where labor is now being extracted from. All right, so the whole thing, the person now complicates this whole narrative about free emancipation, slave labor, and post-emancipation, free labor. Because now in this post-emancipation period, you have a very large part of your population. I think in the terms of of indentured immigrants, annually, I think about 40% of Indian immigrants, particularly East Indian immigrants, were brought before the um the law annually, about 40% of the population. And I think of that, about 20% of them were convicted of some kind of crime annually. All right. So this is not something that you know is barely touching the surface or or anything like that. This is something that is interesting. It's it's big, right? One of the things that caused me to kind of focus on on the incarcerated women, when I look at the stats, because I was working on another project that it was a general project, but of course we centered men and we were looking at what was happening to um the men in the system. I was researching on the project and I was collecting the data, and I realized that during this period, you have the largest number of women incarcerated in the history of Guyana, both in the colonial period and in the post-colonial period. The number

When A Labor Contract Becomes Crime

SPEAKER_01 26:40

of women uh at one year, I think it was like 1871 or 1874, you had um the total prison population was like 11,000 and something. And of that, I think over 3,000 women were incarcerated. As of today, right now, you don't have 3,000 women incarcerated in Guyana. The country's population would have been something like 250,000 people. And now it's over um, it's about a million people, and you don't have 3,000 women incarcerated. I want you to get the scale, the number of women that were um entangled in this system, all right? And so once they're there, like I said before, they're not just there passing time within this system, you know, probably cleaning and cooking and so on. And, you know, that's it. That's not what they're doing. These women are now being sent out there to work, whether it's on the plantations or on all these other areas that they could perform labor. All right. And so while incarcerated, they're not being paid for that labor that they're performing there. But it is mandatory that they perform, they couldn't decide, well, I mean, we're free, we're not enslaved, I don't want to work today. All right. They couldn't do that because they're incarcerated, and in a sense, they're not a property of the state for the period of their incarceration, they're probably the state. And um, throughout the work, I I I showed that you know, the colonial authorities were actually arguing this that, you know, this is better, this is a better labor force than the free labor because this labor is malleable. It could be molded how we want it, we could move it where we want it, we could send it, we could do whatever we want with it. Because one of the um, I think he was the I'm thinking overseer, but he's not overseer, but he was the superintendent of prisons. And he actually was bold enough to say that, you know, I'm paraphrasing, but he was saying, you know, prison labor is the way to go. All right. This is the labor that's um that we can use. And if we use this labor, then it's easier um for us because the kind of labor we can get from these um incarcerated people, we can't get from free workers. All right. We don't have the kind of um control over the free labor population as we do over this incarcerated uh labor population. And so basically, this is the way to go because they talk about a breakdown of discipline within the prison system, all right? And you know, what are some of the things that they can do? And they said, you know, taking them out to work is one of the things that undermines the discipline of the system. And then others will argue that, well, it might undermine the discipline of the system, but what is going to happen if we take them off of these um public works projects, right? And so labor always outweighed whatever else was going on within um the system because this labor that they performed, it wasn't a case where it wasn't profitable, as the prison records show that the prisons, some of them made a profit, and some of them actually broke even. Or if they didn't, it was you know, very it wasn't far from uh breaking even or making a profit. All right, they were in a sense, or to a very large extent, self-sufficient because of the the fact that they could monetize the incarcerated people's labor and use it for um for themselves.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

That's such an interesting point because I think especially for the US context, for our listeners, the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in the U.S., had an exception clause that I don't think many people are, or at least historically have been aware of, right? And the exception to that was that, you know, servitude or you know, the sort of forced labor upon peoples while it was it was being outlawed in the U.S. by the Thirteenth Amendment, the exception was, you know, unless you commit a crime, more or less is is what it's phrased as, right? And it's just interesting to see how whether this was, you know, legally ratified in the US Constitution or happening in colonial societies in the Caribbean. I mean, it's not surprising necessarily, right? But to see that, you know, the ways that these colonial powers have found alternatives um to sort of you know reinforce and perpetuate these systems in ways that you know paint them as in sort of higher regard, right? You're you're able to do this because these people are quote unquote, you know, not valuable or you know, because they're committing these crimes, but um they're using that to their their benefit in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 31:40

As a matter of fact, uh if I could just interject here, one I'm not a superintendent actually said that. You know, the difference between enslaved labor and prison labor is that enslaved people enter a system that they didn't choose, and they felt that when you committed a crime and you and you were incarcerated, that's a choice that you made. His words were that you forfeited your labor because um you committed a crime, and so they felt justified in using this labor because you committed a crime, and so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:13

I I do want to shift our conversation a little bit more specifically in terms of your narrative around women's history, incarcerated women's history. And I'm thinking, you know, books like Sasha Turner's Contested Bodies and you know things in that realm, when we think about women and or you know, enslaved women's histories or enslaved women and labor, let me say it that way, um, in terms of you know the perpetuation of them allowing to continue to birth, you know, next generations of enslaved peoples um after you know the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Um, but this changes that in a in a major way, right? Your your work, I'm saying, changes that in a major way because it allows us to see their labor in a different light, is sort of what I'm motioning towards. And so um in that, you know, your work situates women's labor differently as you argue that prisons became this tool of labor extraction, you know, sites for profit. Can you explain how the colonial state, um, you know, monetized this labor and incarcerated women were really central to its perpetuation?

SPEAKER_01 33:27

Yeah. Um, so what you would find in this period, not a lot of focus in natural reproduction or any of those aspects of the labor system. Because, of course, on one hand, you're bringing the indentured immigrants to, you know, fortify this labor system. And so you're looking at um completely different use of labor. The women, their labor

Prison Labor As A Colonial Business

SPEAKER_01 33:55

is being used directly. This is not a case where they're trying to indirectly use them in some sort of way, or what you find in other um in other penal systems, like say, for example, colonial Australia, or even in the US system, perhaps except in the US South, because um Tilito Le Floria's work on the um post-bellum systems in in Georgia and those places, I think that's the closest we come to something similar to what was happening in colonial Guyana. Because in the Australian colonies, for example, you didn't have women being sent to those Pinot colonies. But the labor that was expected of them, it was, you know, what would traditionally be expected of women, where they provided this sort of reproductive labor. So they were cooking and cleaning and that kind of thing. Even if you come to other Caribbean territories in this post-emancipation period, then Patton's work shows that in Jamaica, for example, that women in this in the penal system, again, were, you know, performing the kind of labor that you would expect of women. Because I think the idea was that, you know, the prison system was supposed to be reformatory, and so you were kind of trying to reform them so that they could become useful members of society once they left the system. You don't see that in the Guyana context. All right. Once these women entered into the system, the labor that they were performing was more aligned with what the men were performing. So it was women and men working on the seawalls, for example, building the um the seawalls. If you I'm not sure how much you know about Guyana, but for your listeners, the coast of Guyana is located below sea level. All right. So if we should have really huge, like very high tides and prolonged periods of rainfall, it will flood. And in the 1860s, there was a massive flood and it inundated the government house and a whole lot. It did a lot of damage. And that was the point where they decided, you know what, we have to do better than what we have because the Dutch, you know, the engineers that they were, they reclaimed a lot of the land and they built what they called um sea dams, but it was made out of earth and and wattle and that kind of thing. And so every so often they would have to reinforce them because of, you know, high tides or prolonged periods of rainfall. And it damaged crops a lot. Because, like right now, we're having a similar experience because we've been under um a period of prolonged rainfall and it's flooding a lot. And so what the British decided is that they're going to do something different from what the Dutch did. They're going to build granite uh seawalls. All right. And so they decided that they're going to construct huge granite walls. Who do you think is the labor that they're using to construct these walls? Right? You had a penal settlement at a place called Mazaruni. It's called Her Majesty's Penal Settlement. And the prisoners from that penal settlement, they were located close to granite mines. And so they would mine the granite and they will bring it down to the coast. So the prisoners from those facilities along the coast, they now will go out there and provide the labor to actually do the uh construction. What was interesting is that you found the requests coming from the superintendent of works. Please send 40 women from the Georgetown jail to work on the seawall. Please send 30 women or how many ever women. And then when you check for that particular day, if you check how many women were in prison at the time, it'll be like 35 women. And so 30 of them would be sent to the seawalls to labor. Five of them were working inside, or then they will you will see some of them went to um work at the other places like the earthen asylum or the uh what they called at the time the lunatic asylum and um the rifle ranges and other uh government places, all right. And so this labor, this is not just talking about women in their cooking and cleaning and this kind of thing, but these are women that are performing hard labor, productive labor, not non-productive or reproductive labor, but productive labor that the colony is benefiting from. All right, whether directly from the plantation owners or indirectly, because if they are working at the orphan asylum, if they're doing all the labor there, then it means that they don't have to hire anybody to do that labor. All right, and so they're saving. And so this is the work that these women are doing. These women are working alongside their male counterpart. In the jails, in the British Guyana context, there wasn't women's labor and men's labor. And this is part of what I argue that, you know, when you really look at it, it is almost like they consciously were trying to defeminize these women or masculinize these women in order to justify, you know, sending them to work on the seawall or sending them to build roads or things like that. Because the only difference at this time in you know, conditions for women and men would have been their sleeping arrangements.

Women On Seawalls And Public Works

SPEAKER_01 39:40

The women and men were housed in the same facilities. There was no exclusive women's prison facility until the late 1800s. The 1890s, I think, is the first one that um what was called Fellowship. That's the first facility that they had for exclusively for women. And it was because the other prisons had become um overcrowded, and so they decided, you know what, let's just take one of these facilities and just send women there um only. Right? And they lived together, they work together. When we look at even something as simple as the kind of clothing that they wore, women started wearing um dresses and these kinds of things until the early 1900s. That's when women were given um dresses um in prison. So they wore the same kinds of clothes that that the men um that the men wore, their their diets didn't differ. The punishment, the only difference in the punishment, and again, which kind of points to masculinization and and defeminization was haircutting. All right. So whereas um men, you know, they could be flogged and they could be um discharged and so on, women couldn't be flogged because remember, part of the amelioration proposal was the um prohibition of flogging for women. And so that continued in the post-emancipation period. They felt that a more suitable punishment for women would be cutting their hair. All right, so they did that, they cut the hair, and of course, if you cut a woman's hair, then how are you able to differentiate between a woman and a man, especially when they're dressing them the same way and they're marching them to the seawall through the streets at the top? Exactly. So, you know, this kind of strengthens the whole argument that this is what they're doing. They're making these women into men in it for all intents and purposes. And so that you could say, well, yeah, they could do the kind of labor that we expect um, that we expect men to do. And so you see now at emancipation in 1838, to give you a c some kind of context, at emancipation in 1838, you had three prison locations. Because remember, we said we had three colonies, right? Or three, well, by then it had unified, but you had three separate spaces. So you had a prison in Berbese, you had one in Georgetown, which is in Demerara, and you had one in a place called Wakenam, which is kind of like the Esiquebo um area. Three. At the height of the indentureship period, you had 11 permanent prison locations. And I'm differentiating between permanent because you also had what they call temporary prisons that would pop up at various places that needed um any kind of public works or so. So you will have a prison pop up, like literally a prison pop up there, and they will do whatever was needed, and then it it could be there for a year, it could be there for um a couple of months. As a matter of fact, one or two of them actually ended up becoming permanent prison sites, all right? And so when you look at the location of all of these prisons, all of them were located with the exception of the Mazarini prison, which was way up because it was a penal settlement. But all the other sites were located along what we call the sugar belt, where all the plantations were, and so they were interspersed within this, um, within these plantations because the whole purpose of having them was to warehouse these bodies that can now be used to provide labor for these plantations and for these auto works.

SPEAKER_00 43:24

That was a lot to sit with. The history is, as I has started out saying, far more complicated than I think we oftentimes um sit with generally. In what ways did you also see women sort of challenging these coercive systems, right? How did they resist or um sort of creatively an application?

SPEAKER_01 44:00

navigate these conditions to you know allow for their own agency even amidst all that was going on I want to talk about that and I want

Resistance Found In Biased Records

SPEAKER_01 44:10

to kind of include the archives as well because of course um a lot of times the these archives that we use to do these kinds of work the these archives weren't designed to perform these kinds of things as you as you know because you're a historian right most of the documents that that that I used are official documents these are the official prison reports the official punishment records the letters to the governor because I had lots of petitions that these incarcerated people were petitioning the governor for to be um released for whatever reason the the petitions were the only documents that actually give you some insight into the incarcerated people but all of these records when you read them like we say as historians if we read them against the bias grain we get a completely different story than the story that they intended to tell. And so I was able to write about resistance and agency and all of that by doing exactly that. Because when I got to the punishment record you're reading you know so many women in solitary confinement so many women are on um bread and water diet or what they call punishment diet. All right so many women had their hair cut all right and then they will tell you you know so many women attempted to run away and so on. And all of that is not just recording punishment but what it's telling you is that these women are not just sitting in this system. They're not just passive respondents to what was happening or they didn't just sit there and allow things to happen to them. They were resisting this system. You wouldn't be sent to solitary confinement for doing nothing or you wouldn't be um have your hair cut or any of those things just because you're there. You had to be doing something and what it tells us is that these women are fighting the system in whatever way they could all right I think one of my most interesting stories of resistance there was this woman in prison um her name was Betty Maxwell I I I just remember there are like five women that I remember them so well because you know after you spend time with your subjects you know you you they they become intimate to you and um Betty Maxwell because at the time you could go um I'm sure you you you know that you have to take your children to prison if you were sentenced all right if you didn't have um you know an option of leaving them anywhere then you take them and again reading the records like the baptismal records the church records because each prison had a chaplain and and so on and they would have to write a report to submit as part of the annual report for the prison. And so the um the chaplain's report will talk about oh this year we baptized five infants or something like that. And of course like five infants which meant that you know you had children there or then they will talk about uh when you look at the diet um you had a separate diet for the infants or something like that and so you know that these children were also a part of the system and so there was this woman called Betty Maxwell and I learned about Betty Maxwell because a prison officer he was petitioning the governor for payment he was trying to recapture her and and and he didn't get through and so he was asking for his payment. But it seems as though Betty Maxwell she went to work in the seawall and I don't know she probably saw an opportunity and she decided that she was going to run away I I'm not mad at Betty Maxwell for running away. But the thing that threw everybody and that you know the government was in such disbelief about was that he was like this woman ran away and she left her child in the jail. Because when you took your children there, obviously if you had to go out to work you couldn't take the children out to work. So there was maybe one or two women that were um left within the jail that looked after all the children. And so she was sent to work in the Seawall but her baby was in jail and she saw her opportunity and she decided to run. And I mean that in itself tells you a lot about the system because which woman which mother will decide to you know you already got uh um went so far as to take the child to jail with you and then you know you had this opportunity and you took the opportunity and you ran and you left your child there. Like that tells you so much about what kind of system that you were experiencing. And I think she on she she probably bargained that you know they will have to send the child to the orphan asylum then you know she probably would fare it out as because they wouldn't keep the child I'm thinking you know they wouldn't keep the child in jail if the mother isn't um is not there. But they're all of these and there are a lot more examples of these women that I talk about in the book of these women just um trying to overturn the system and uh um either running running away from the system, escaping the system fighting back they talk about women um spitting on the on the matron when they eventually had matrons because they didn't have them um initially and um trying to fight the people and so on. So they're all of these instances of these women trying to establish their agency and um resisting the system and of course being resilient um throughout it. I think oftentimes for me the interesting part about colonial records in that way, you're obviously not getting it from the perspective of you know the the women who like Maxine who you're um trying to write about but there is a way of us using these colonial records to paint these histories um so we have you know these stories for for generations to come I do want to shift in a in a opposite regard because I always ask love to ask our um guest on the show what are some of the ways that you know these histories if at all I know you know it's been several centuries since um but you know these stories show up in modern popular culture hmm um well because I'm Chinese I'll have to say um in a lot of the poems especially those by uh Martin Carter uh his poems of resistance because he to because he too was incarcerated on the um the colonial system in the 19 in the 1950s when they were you know accused of being communists and all kinds of things and and and so on and they were incarcerated for that period of time right but because of that the way that he writes it's

Culture Echoes And Modern Parallels

SPEAKER_01 50:45

it's not just I mean like for me I'm writing about incarcerated people but I'm I'm an observer of the system I'm outside looking in and you know working from that angle of it but um Cartoon I think you kind of feel his work because he is writing as somebody who actually experienced the system and there's just something I don't know if you've read um Martin Carter I encourage you to um to to seek him out but there's just something moving about um about the way that he writes about these colonial systems about the imprisoned and the dispossessed and and so on you know his work is really um powerful and I think a lot of that comes because he of the this direct experience that he had um with the system that his um his work comes over a little more I I guess authentic is the word that I'm looking for rather than you know just from the outside I'm looking but I also wanted to mention David Rudder because I love clips of music and David Rudder has this song called um Bahia Girl. I don't know if you ever heard it if you haven't um take a listen right it's a funny song but you know he he meditates a little bit on the aspects of the diaspora and displacement and and labor as I said is at the core of um of that song uh and a little bit about movement of of bodies across the the Atlantic waters and and and so on all of that in search of survival because you know that's what really brought especially immigrants here a search of survival and then they become entangled in this system of um labor exploitation in one form or the other. So even though yeah it's a nice little funny song and so on you know there are those aspects of it I find myself a lot of times especially when listening to those kind of old calyps and so on I'm always looking for these kinds of connections and I see that a lot in in um in those older kinds of works. So yeah so I was saying Carter and um a little bit of David um of David Rudder for me.

SPEAKER_00 52:49

Definitely I'll be sure to add them um both to our strictly fact syllabus for our listeners to check out.

SPEAKER_01 52:55

In an amazing way this conversation brings so many stories to the fore right your upcoming book brings so many stories to the fore but I have to sort of implore and ask you given that this book speaks to conversations about incarceration and you know injustice what parallels do you see between um these colonial systems that we've discussed and sort of modern carceral practices whether that's in the Caribbean or even in the diaspora as well I mean unfortunately quite a lot of them I mean the basic logic of the system that you know certain bodies are available for extraction and um and criminality you know that in itself is a mechanism of of labor control and movement and the whole idea of of the prison as an economic institution as much as it is a um a punitive one because economics is part of the logic of um of of incarceration so when you know when you talk about the carceral complex and uh and and all of that economics is um on the guards all of that the same way that it did in this post-emancipation period when we talk about the you know the prison industrial complex and when when people are talking about that in contemporary terms what I'm trying to show that this is not something new this is a continuation this is something that is systemic this is something that has you know they they kind of refined it over time all right but this is not something that is contemporary this is not something that now emerges is something that they have been building on for um for centuries all right when we look at the people who are disproportionately incarcerated you see um other parallels because you know disproportionately it's black and brown bodies that you find in these systems I mean understandably so for the Caribbean because of the um demographics of the population but when you look at like the United States for example where you know persons of black and brown um bodies are disproportionately incarcerated all right this this this not just saying that that that is a fact that's what this that shows that they're disproportionately um incarcerated and black and brown women also are more likely to be caught in the system than you know um than white women right and so again this is a continuation of a much earlier period of time this is not anything new all right and of course at the center of all of this is labor as you mentioned earlier the 13th amendment where you're you know kind of forfeit your labor if you get caught up in um in in the carceral system all right and so your labor is now used that is a direct legacy um of colonialism within not only in the Caribbean but overall all right in the United States and it extends to other parts in of um in Africa and in other parts of the world and so what I want to show is that these arguments that these um you know abolitionists and the persons that study colonial carcerality and all of this these are not only contemporary struggles then all right these are things that began a very long time ago and over time they have been refined into systems that currently exist within these societies whether it's in the Caribbean or um whether it's in um North America so I want to show them that they're correct the arguments that they're making

Key Takeaways And Book Recommendation

SPEAKER_01 56:45

they are um correct all right and um looking at the genealogy then it's one of the tools that we can actually use for you know liberation that is a very powerful point to end on and so Dr.

SPEAKER_00 56:58

Adams I thank you so much for joining us for this episode I truly learned a lot and I hope our listeners did as well I implore all of you listening um to check out Dr. Adams' book Slavery Indentorship in women's labor early British Guyana Jails due out this October I'll be sure to include the link to it in our show notes um and be sure to check it out and so again Dr. Adams thank you so much for joining us listeners let us know what you learned let us know your thoughts um if this brought up any new connections and things for you and till next time lickle more