... labor to gauge its impact on reproduction. An intensification of agronomy with medical studies, Songo was hated. Songo chiefdom was home to Befale, headquarters of an intensive Fonds du Bien Etre Indigene project with infertility clinic. By 1939, Befale territory contained a penal colony for dangerous...

... Chapter 4 explores the identities of the penal colony’s inhabitants. It first conducts a statistical and a qualitative reading of convict matriculation records that offer a wealth of biographical detail. These records reveal their makers’ worldviews, and the ideological assumptions and political...

... slave criminals into prisons to examine how authorities enforced their sentences. In 1881, the Justice Ministry ordered the penal colony’s commander to conduct a survey of slave convicts. He interviewed 264 slave convicts and recorded data that, along with other records, make it possible to sketch their...

... This chapter introduces the reader to the contradictions and contours of everyday penal colony life by way of an 1853 dispute between a number of slave and free convicts and Izabel, the colony commander’s slave. The convicts provided Izabel with produce they had grown on their provision grounds...

... Chapter 2 traces the colony’s colonial origins and evolving role in the larger penal justice system after Brazilians won their independence in 1822 until its closure as a national penal colony in 1898. It examines the colony’s evolution in relation to mainland history. Pernambuco and the army...

... Brasília only functions because of its unplanned-for satellite cities where most of the laborers essential for its upkeep live. The chapter contends that contraband and licit commerce are the unplanned-for dark twins of planned prisons and penal colonies, proving essential to the planned penal colony’s...

... strata of the penal colony population together to profit from convicts’ seemingly unquenchable thirst for it. Ties of patronage and corruption bound together networks between officers, civil servants, vendors, soldiers, and convicts who at times competed with one another to dominate the steep profits...