City of Order

Download or read book City of Order written by Michael Boudreau and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interwar Halifax was a city in flux, a place where citizens debated adopting new ideas and technologies but agreed on one thing – modernity was corrupting public morality and unleashing untold social problems on their fair city. In this context, citizens, policy makers, and officials turned to the criminal justice system to create a bulwark against further social dislocation. Officials modernized the city’s machinery of order – courts, prisons, and the police force – and placed greater emphasis on crime control, while residents supported tough-on-crime measures and attached little importance to rehabilitation. These initiatives gave birth to a constructed vision of a criminal class that singled out ethnic minorities, working-class men, and female and juvenile offenders as problem figures in the eternal quest for order. Michael Boudreau’s in-depth study of crime and culture in interwar Halifax, the first of its kind, shows how tough-on-crime measures can compound, rather than resolve, social inequalities and dislocations.