In the 1830s, British abolitionists and planters were equally convinced that the ending of state‐sanctioned enslavement in the Caribbean required an alternative system of coercion in order to deliver labor to capital. It was the law that remained firmly installed as the preferred mechanism for the achievement of this objective. The only difference was that the relationship between capital and labor was no longer grounded in the legal definition of people as chattel but now worked itself out through police, court, and prison. It is the prison that stands at the center of the system in Diana Paton's excellent book. This enables her to reveal substantial continuities between slavery, the “apprenticeship” that followed formal abolition in 1834, and the “full freedom” that commenced in 1838. The late eighteenth century witnessed a great enthusiasm for prison‐building in Jamaica, as a project of the planter class. In the period after 1834, antislavery advocates quickly came to share the planters' enthusiasm, and the number of prisons reached almost thirty during the apprenticeship. From the perspective of the overlords, the public prison was an attractive site for the discipline of enslaved people by removing punishment from the plantation. There were limits, of course, because the planter did not wish to lose for long the labor of his enslaved workers, and, in any case, the idea of “reforming” the enslaved was difficult to grapple with. Other varieties of terror were experimented with, such as the transportation of enslaved convicts. Australia was a long way away, and the thought of being sent there as a convict was intended to instill dread, but the cost was great and the opportunity closed off in 1837.