City of Order

Know about the book -

City of Order is written by Michael Boudreau and published by UBC Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0774822074 (ISBN 10) and 9780774822077 (ISBN 13).

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.