Crime and punishment in immediate post-emancipation Tobago

Dr Rita Pemberton

In preparation for the onset of full Emancipation on August 1, 1838, Tobago’s ruling elite and planter class who were opposed to the termination of the apprenticeship system, set a series of mechanisms in motion to prevent the freed Africans from attaining real freedom. They continued to view the Africans as destined to labour on their estates, and their actions were based on the fear of losing their workforce which would cripple plantation operations and affect their profits. It was considered the duty of the free workers to labour on the estates. In addition to their offerings of abysmally low wages and identical working conditions as during enslavement, the planters’ strategy was the imposition of a body of restrictive laws intended to assert their rights to extract labour from the workers and force them to do their bidding. After emancipation, oppressive laws replaced the physical chains of enslavement.

The laws made any action by a free worker perceived to be a dereliction of duty an offence. For example, vagrancy which was loosely defined as choosing employers, was an illegal act and was punishable under the law. A worker who passed an estate where they refused to work, on their way to work at another site, was considered a vagrant.

The penalty for non-compliance with these laws included jail terms with hard labour, which meant laborious work carrying and breaking stone to repair public roads, cleaning streets or the jail. Female prisoners were required to wash or repair prisoners’ clothes. But to prevent malingering, low productivity and disobedience, a treadmill was installed in the prison on the island. The treadmill was a rotating cylinder surrounded by several steps. As the cylinder revolved, the prisoners were forced to move at great speed or stumble, fall and be badly injured. In addition, they received a flogging. The motive behind this installation was to stimulate speedy work from the prisoners. Described as a “barbarous form of punishment,” the treadmill was removed from the island in 1844.

There were two prisons on the island - one in Plymouth and the other in Scarborough. The Plymouth prison was closed in 1842 because it was expensive to upkeep, was badly run and it was felt that if the Scarborough prison was enlarged there would be no need for a second prison on the island. This left the Scarborough jail as Tobago’s only prison. But it was always inadequate in size for acceptable accommodation of the increasing incarcerated population. Across the period, it was generally described as overcrowded and the inspector of prisons advocated for the construction of a new prison or its relocation to a more suitable site. In addition, the prison was generally in a dilapidated state with a leaking roof, rotten floors and shutters, and was not considered suitable for European prisoners. When the treadmill was removed from the island, the shed in which it was housed provided a welcome addition to the institution and was used to establish a sick ward for the prisoners.

Prisoners were accommodated by classification. The first level of separation was made between those who were awaiting trial and those who were convicted. Convicted prisoners were separated according to the crimes they committed and those confined for misdemeanours – the lowest level on the crime scale – were separated from those committed for higher level crimes such as murder. Debtors who were usually white or of mixed race, females and sick or invalid prisoners were each provided with separate accommodation. Soldiers and sailors who flouted the laws were handled separately by the military authorities.

The main crimes committed on the island were felony (violent attacks on people), petty theft, misdemeanours such as minor wounding, and indebtedness. The numbers of offences in the first two categories increased over the decade of the 1840s. Felonies were frequently caused by disagreements over money matters while petty thefts usually involved stealing produce or animals. In some instances, the two were related when an irate owner tried to punish a person who stole items from his property. Charges of theft which were commonly made by plantation owners who accused workers of stealing items from the estate, reflected the increase of planter/worker conflicts during the post-emancipation years. Less frequent during the period were instances of murder, which was punishable by transportation to an unknown destination for periods ranging from permanent to 15, ten or five years. It is not clear if anyone ever returned from those sentences.

There was a strict operating regime for prisoners whose meal and work times were fixed, and who were not allowed to fraternise with each other. But the poor state of the prison structures permitted communication across the rotting partitions. Breaches of the prison regulations were punishable with flogging, solitary isolation, and while it was in operation, the treadmill.

Prisoners were fed meals made up of rice, saltfish, flour and vegetables – something that remained unchanged across the decade of the 1840s. Variation of their diet occurred only when it was recommended by the prison doctor, at which time saltfish would be replaced by a half pound of fresh meat and a wine glass of rum. The only religious instruction that prisoners received was the prayers and bible readings provided during the irregular visits of the Anglican priest. The inspector of prisons lamented the irregularity of this service which he felt was useful to help mould character change in the prison population. He suggested that the irregularity of the Anglican clergy occurred because it was neither a formally arranged nor a paid service, and he recommended that the pastors from the Moravian and Methodist churches be invited to minister to the prisoners. Although in his annual reports the inspector of prisons lauded the cleanliness of the prison and the healthy state of the prisoners, he stated that prisoners were bathed only “when necessary” with sea water.

During the first decade after Emancipation, non-plantation labour was considered deviancy, a threat to the continuation of plantation operations and offenders were punished under a series of draconian laws. While planters conveniently asserted what they considered their right to the labour of the African population, they sought to force the workers to accept their subjugated role. On the other hand, the freed Africans were determined to free themselves from the controlling hand of the planters and chart their own course in accordance with their ambitions. The stage was set for the intensification of the post-emancipation worker struggles in Tobago.