From 1834 to 1850, Latin America's first penitentiary, the Casa de Correção in Rio de Janeiro, was a construction site where slaves, “liberated Africans”, convicts, and unfree workers interacted daily, forged identities, and deployed resistance strategies against the pressures of confinement and the demands of Brazil's eclectic labor regimes. This article examines the utilization of this motley crew of workers, the interactions among “liberated Africans”, slaves, and convict laborers, and the government's intervention between 1848 and 1850 to restrict slave labor at the prison in favor of free waged workers. It asserts that the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 and the subsequent inauguration of the penitentiary augured profound changes in Rio's labor landscape, from a predominantly unfree to a free wage labor force.
In June 1835, the Brazilian parliament promulgated a stringent law which punished enslaved persons convicted of assassinating their masters with capital punishment. Called the “law of necessity,” the regulation targeted the leaders of slave rebellions and established the death penalty as punishment against slave resistance. Research on the enforcement of the law demonstrated that while the regulation increased public hangings of the enslaved, overall fewer convict slaves were executed because of the law than had their sentences commuted to galé perpétua or a lifetime of penal servitude in public works. Analyzing slave petitions to commute death penalty sentences to penal servitude, this article intervenes in the debates on punishing the enslaved which connects labor history with the history of punishment. The research probes convicts’ understanding of the construction of Brazilian legal culture while analyzing the tensions between slave-owners and imperial authorities on punishing the enslaved.
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