Murder in New Orleans explores violence, race, and criminal justice in New Orleans from 1920 to 1945. It analyzes changing patterns of murder, charting the impact of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, racial segregation, the flowering of Jim Crow, and World War II on lethal violence in the largest city in the South. The book also examines a series of counter-intuitive trends in crime and punishment that combined to generate mushrooming racial disparities in criminal justice and eerily presaged late twentieth-century developments in law enforcement, incarceration, and race relations. I ... More

Murder in New Orleans explores violence, race, and criminal justice in New Orleans from 1920 to 1945. It analyzes changing patterns of murder, charting the impact of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, racial segregation, the flowering of Jim Crow, and World War II on lethal violence in the largest city in the South. The book also examines a series of counter-intuitive trends in crime and punishment that combined to generate mushrooming racial disparities in criminal justice and eerily presaged late twentieth-century developments in law enforcement, incarceration, and race relations. In New Orleans between 1920 and 1945 lethal violence soared when the economy boomed and plunged when the economy tanked. Changing trends in gun violence played a particularly important role in shifting levels of murder. Moreover, punishment increased precisely when crime decreased. Deteriorating race relations shaped this process, and New Orleans’s African American community went from being under-policed to being over-policed. At the start of the era, white homicide conviction rates were higher than African American rates, and police brutality mainly targeted white suspects. By the 1930s, the patterns had reversed, and horrific racial disparities developed, with African American New Orleanians far more often shot and beaten by the police as well as convicted at higher rates and incarcerated for longer terms, despite a rapid decrease in criminal violence. In New Orleans, the roots of the modern carceral state began to emerge during the 1920s and 1930s, when trends in punishment bore scant connection to patterns of crime.