Disciplining Boys: Labor, Gender, Generation, and the Penal System in Barbados, 1880-1930

Abstract

n the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Colonial Office bureaucrats sent memos and handwrote notations in the margins of memos expressing mounting frustration with the far greater proclivity of Barbados magistrates to order the flogging of delinquent boys than elsewhere in the British West Indies. The practice seemed particularly abhorrent during this period as Britain itself was engaged in an ongoing process of reforming the system of juvenile justice at home. Indeed, excessive whipping of male juveniles was not the only thing that stood out about the Barbados penal system, although it was the feature that provoked the most anxiety at Colonial Office. Women were also far more likely to be incarcerated in Barbados than in the other major sugar-producing British territories in the Caribbean. Over the forty-five-year period, 1873–1917, women comprised more than fifty percent of annual prison-goers in all but nine years, only once, in 1876, a year of mass riots, dropping below forty-eight percent of the total. Typically, this translated into a per capita rate of imprisonment only slightly below that of males (as females made up over fifty-five percent of the population), but during the extraordinary circumstances of the “Panama exodus” (1905–13), when there was a huge surge in male emigration, women were committed to penal imprisonment at significantly higher per capita rates than men. For nearly three centuries, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, Barbados maintained the paradigmatic features of a colonial plantation economy and society, particularly as defined by Caribbeanists whose work foregrounds this “total institution” model. 1 Almost unique in its sustained and faithful adherence to the classic bundle of features characterizing the “pure” plantation economy, Barbados provided this group of dependency scholars with as near-perfect a model for their theories as nineteenth-century Britain had