Punishment in Paradise: Race, Slavery, Human Rights and a Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Penal Colony by Peter M. Beattie (review)

We can learn a great deal about a society, its culture, and its patterns of power by examining its penal institutions, thereby discovering its rules of behavior, the sorts of people who broke those rules, the kinds of punishment that they incurred, and much more. When the prison happens to be an island, its voluminous records can provide a special opportunity for interdisciplinary analysis. The island of Fernando de Noronha is about two miles wide by six miles long, with several hundred cultivable acres, separated from mainland Brazil by 200 miles of open ocean that made walled cell blocks unnecessary. At its high point in the second half of the nineteenth century, it had a diverse population of convicts ranging from 1,000 to 1,500 (including a small number of women), along with several hundred wives or partners and their children. An army garrison of 200 soldiers and officers was in charge. A few non-convict provisioners completed the island’s population.

Beattie treats Fernando de Noronha as a microcosm of several themes relevant for the history of Brazil as a whole. Several unsuccessful political dissidents were exiled there, removing them from mainland machinations while adding an element of potential agitation to an already tense environment. Political affiliations also affected the appointments of garrison commanders and their subordinates. The convict population grew much of its own food, either in labor assignments on the large prison farm or on individual plots. But the island depended on the mainland for certain foodstuffs, tools, clothing, and other supplies. The available goods were distributed through what Beattie calls the dark twins of licit and underground commerce, often in exchange for services involving sex, favored treatment, and access to networks of patronage that crisscrossed the ragged boundaries between convicts and non-convicts.

The main social categories on the island were the prisoners, both slaves and non-slaves, and the soldiers sent to supervise them, many of whom were the victims of military impressment. Beattie uses their interaction to explore what he terms the “category drift” among sectors of Brazil’s intractable poor. Issues of sexuality and gender were complicated by official policies allowing some of the convicts to live separately with wives or consensual partners while the bulk of the prison population had to occupy large dormitories. Since Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888, the situation of slaves is of particular interest. Amid legal debates about their status during the transition from old-regime absolutism to liberalism, slave convicts tended to receive treatment much like that of their non-slave counterparts.

As a way to reflect on Brazil as a whole at the time, as well as on penology, gender, slavery, and human rights in the greater Atlantic world, Fernando de Noronha’s history magnifies some points and either distorts or omits others. But Beattie’s approach shows how this unique setting can inform a varied range of larger issues.