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

During the nineteenth century the small archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, located 200 miles off Northeastern Brazil, functioned as a penal colony. Often criticized for becoming a “paradise” for convicts, instead of a place where they ought to be punished, Fernando de Noronha provides a window not only into trans-Atlantic debates of slavery and human rights, but also into how race, class, slavery, and family life shaped the lives of the “intractable poor” in nineteenth-century Brazil. Indeed, Peter Beattie has produced a multi-faceted and insightful study, a prime example of how to study Brazil’s popular classes as both a coherent and a multi-faceted group.

It starts with a richly textured portrait of daily life in the penal colony, including legal and illicit practices. During the second half of the 1800s the island hosted about 1,000–1,500 inmates, most of them sentenced for homicide, about 200 military and civilian personnel, and a few hundred family members of both the free and the convict inhabitants. Only about 400 inmates lived in common dorms under direct surveillance; most others resided in individual barracks and houses near the centre of Remédios, the town hosting the archipelago’s administration. Forced labour consisted of performing gang labour in the island’s cultivated fields, and while the inmates received a meager salary, they supplemented this income with activities such as legal and clandestine commerce, service to the administrators, prostitution, or gambling. As most inhabitants were poorly fed and clothed, the authorities tolerated and sometimes even profited from clandestine trade. The parallels with the slave quarters of Brazilian plantations and with government-controlled Indian settlements become inescapable, as all of them were, to use Erving Goffman’s classic concept, total institutions.

In comparison to Western countries, Brazil exhibited a clear preference for the integration of convicts from different gender, social, and racial groups. The boundaries of whiteness were not policed by the Brazilian state, Beattie tells us, as slaves were not segregated from other convicts and were evenly distributed among the work gangs. Attempts at segregating or shackling them in the 1870s clashed with Brazilian traditions of long standing and with the new abolitionist ideas of the day, so they were generally deemed dangerous, disruptive, or outright immoral. However, nonwhites received disproportionately more forced labour sentences than whites, and experienced “category drift” much more often — that is, the change of civil status imposed upon poor Brazilians by state or other elites for purposes such as military impressment. Chapter eight actually shows how, while Emperor Dom Pedro II’s decision of commuting all death sentences to slaves for forced labour increased slave arrivals to Fernando in the 1850s, three decades later most of them received pardons from the government thanks to the spread of abolitionist ideas.

But while race or the condition of slave were not used to segregate Fernando’s inmate population, conjugal living was granted to selected prisoners (as many as ten percent of them), and used as a mechanism of classification and reward. There were attempts at prohibiting spouses and children to live in the island in 1879, when a new commander took office, but once again the attempt at segregating convicts by gender was ultimately dismissed as immoral: bachelor living was seen as contrary to custom and fostering homosexual behavior. Having a family home and a provision ground, then, was used in the same way as in a plantation: as a privilege to “rank, reward, and discriminate” among convicts (236).

Slavery was also intertwined with Brazil’s policies on flogging and the death penalty, for as Beattie observes, those three policy areas were debated together at the same key moments of the nineteenth century in all corners of the Atlantic. Slavery’s abolition preceded that of capital punishment, which explains why the Southern US states never...