The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 - Paperbackby John Bardes (Author) Americans often assume that slave societies had little use for prisons and police because slaveholders only ever inflicted violence directly or through overseers. Mustering tens of thousands of previously overlooked arrest and prison records, John K. Bardes demonstrates the opposite: in parts of the South, enslaved and free people were jailed at astronomical rates. Slaveholders were deeply reliant on coercive state action.