This chapter explores the entanglement of the process to inaugurate the Casa de Correção with the political crisis that culminated in the suppression of the slave trade after 1850. I argue that the inauguration of the penitentiary in 1850 belongs to the articulation of policies to restructure slavery geographically in Brazil as the country moved decisively, under considerable British pressure, to suppress the contraband slave trade. The chapter probes the July 1850 decree that regulated the Casa de Correção as Brazil’s first penitentiary. It contends that the continued utilization of unfree labor proved to be a crucial part of the campaign to repress the slave trade and the entangled processes through which authorities deployed the prison to administer the ripple effects of the ending of human trafficking. I also interrogate how administrators of the Casa de Correção struggled to implement the congregate regime for prisoners sentenced to “prison with work” while overseeing its other dependencies. This demonstrates how penitentiary labor was deeply shaped by larger societal and economic forces of the Atlantic World.

The introduction problematizes the interpretation of postemancipation Brazil from the perspective of slavery’s abolition in May 1888 as a temporal watershed to explore the making of race, nation, and citizenship for people of African descent and their intersection with policing, crime, and punishment. It reframes the history of nineteenth-century Brazil through the lens of policing freedom, which reckons with the systematic implementation of criminal justice reforms that defined the terrain of freedom and citizenship for racialized Brazilians of African descent while slavery thrived in Brazil. It brings attention to the significance of the penitentiary in incubating changes in labor relations in nineteenth-century Brazil and its deployment as a site for the racialization of the poor, while anchoring these local developments within a broader global transformation of the labor regime of the Atlantic World by historians of the “second slavery.”

The first chapter examines the changing landscape of slavery and freedom that developed in North America in the revolutionary era. It explores how and why opportunities for enslaved people to permanently escape bondage expanded significantly between the colonial era and the early nineteenth century. The chapter begins with a discussion of how slave flight was characterized during the colonial period, underscoring the informal nature of sancturary spaces and the lack of any spaces of "formal freedom" throughout the continent, as slavery was legally sanctioned everywhere. It then delves into the major transitions that occurred in the Age of Revolutions, with the abolition of slavery in the Northern United States, British Canada, and Mexico; as well as the wave of manumissions in the southern states that greatly bolstered urban free black communities. By the mid-1830s, enslaved people who found themselves trapped in the second slavery of the American South saw potential "spaces of freedom" in every direction: informal freedom within urban areas in the South itself; semi-formal (contested) freedom in the Northern United States; and formal freedom beyond the borders of the United States.