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Book Review
| Diana Paton, No Bond But the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 291. $23.95 (ISBN 0-8223-3398-8).
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| Until I read Paton's book, I had harbored the idea from my Trinidadian school days that the abolitionists had fought effectively for freedom in the Caribbean colonies. Remembering Bartolomé de las Casas' successful advocacy for Amerindian freedom in exchange for African bondage, I happily accepted that Britain's emancipation declaration meant far more than the burial of the chains of enslaved Africans. Instead, Paton shows how post-abolition Jamaica replaced the slavemaster's whip with the jailer's key. |
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Paton argues that the end of plantation slavery in Jamaica was coupled with the expansion of prisons as an "enlightened" means of social control. Inspired by the European humanitarian movement of the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries, British abolitionists and social reformers adopted "modern" theories of "corrections" and Jamaica, Britain's most prosperous sugar colony, proved fertile ground for their application. But a fundamental problem for imperial policy-makers and the local planter class was reconciling penal philosophy with labor needs and a rebellious workforce, and the hegemonic conflicts among the various hierarchies of elites with a stake in Jamaica's destiny. |
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Historical accounts of Caribbean slavery all touch on the use of law to create, maintain, and ultimately end the institution of slavery, but none before Paton's had teased out the relationship between reformist ideologies of punishment and the creation of the newer systems of social control in the colonies. In tracing the establishment of punishment in Jamaica, Paton's analysis extends to state formation. She details the conflicts between imperial elites—which included absentee sugar plantation owners—and the resident planter elites, over the rules for the treatment of the African workforce. She also describes the disputes between African laborers and state's magistrates. The book illustrates how these competing interests shaped Jamaica's penal system, how correctional theory was adjusted to address the "character" and culture of Jamaica's African population, how the punishment of women was "modernized," and how Jamaica's African population made use of the law while continuing to rely upon obeah and myalism—their own folk forms of conflict-resolution. |
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In the first two chapters, Paton describes the changes that accompanied Jamaica's first prison boom in the 1780s–1790s. The inmates of these new jails and houses of correction (workhouses) were mostly runaway slaves committed by planters, not the courts. While eighteenth-century thinkers saw the workhouse as a civilized means of reforming criminals, local planter elites co-opted the idea to ensure an adequate supply of slave labor and to secure their dominance. Financed by planters, the workhouses became an extension of the plantation. In the 1830s, under apprenticeship, slaves—renamed apprentices—were required to work for their former masters under specified conditions and for stipulated wages. The stipendiary magistrates appointed to ensure the apprentices' rights soon found themselves enforcing labor discipline for the planters. Instead of reformation, "submissive obedience to the law" was the legacy of the apprenticeship era. |
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In the next three chapters, Paton analyzes other abolitionist reforms in Jamaica's prisons, beginning with the treadmill—advocated as a "civilized substitute" for flogging. One of Paton's central themes involves the differential treatment of women prisoners. Imperial reformers condemned flogging of women as uncivilized and improper. Instead, they advocated the treadmill as a device for rehabilitation. Women (and men) were sentenced to work long hours on treadmills—a form of punishment that also served to drive the local economy. Penitentiary-style prisons were later introduced with the goal of rehabilitation through silence and quiet work, but by the 1870s, corporal punishment had been institutionalized anew. |
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None of these ideas (each touted as a sure means of "civilizing" Jamaican society) was based on the actual conditions of life inside Jamaica; they were all derived from the social reality of free Englishmen living in Britain. Paton cites a prevailing rationale among officials that Jamaica's African prisoners were not suited for reformation because of alleged racial differences such as a lack of self-control, ambition, and responsibility. General Inspector of Prisons John Daughtrey, for instance, stated in 1834 that "Negroes" needed a "moral awakening of conscience" (133). |
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Paton devotes a chapter to how Jamaica's working population viewed law and punishment. From an initial celebration of "no bond but the law," they ended up rebellious, distrustful, and skeptical. On the other hand, as their social status improved, they used the courts in relatively large numbers to settle personal conflicts with neighbors and kinfolk. The less privileged made use of obeah and myalism. |
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Paton's historiography succeeds in showing how the forms of punishment that characterized Jamaica between 1780–1870 emerged out of struggle as well as ideology. "Reformation" and "rehabititation" for Jamaicans are not clearly defined by the author, but they were official goals. Did they mean conformity to enslavement or subservience? Or did they mean conformity to the rights and obligations of citizenship? Paton recognizes that Jamaica's punishment system reflected the material aspects of penal policy for imperial and local elites, as well as Jamaica's working people. Her use of the work of Marx, Gramsci, and Foucault to fashion her theoretical framework is illuminating. Finally, Paton's book clearly reflects the full irony of its title—after emancipation, the former slavemasters simply bureaucratized punishment and gave it a new name—the law. |
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| Cynthia Mahabir
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| University of California, Berkeley |
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