Today marks the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, celebrated in history books for extending U.S. influence throughout the hemisphere. But few Americans are aware of its lesser-known predecessor – “The Jefferson-Monroe Penal Doctrine” – which first proposed using slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime to establish a national penal colony. At a time of continued reckoning over slavery in the United States, it is also a fitting moment to consider the roots of prison expansion in empire.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, Gabriel Prosser and hundreds of enslaved people in Virginia planned a revolt. Enslavers and local militia discovered and thwarted the rebellion amid a suffocating climate of white hysteria over the revolution taking place on the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, where enslaved people were engaged in a struggle against slavery that would establish the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere.
