Murder in New Orleans

[Adler has a] remarkable ability to craft a narrative that brings the quantitative data set--2,118 homicide cases--to life in such vivid and gut-wrenching detail. -- Journal of African American History The major strength of Adler's work rests in the sources. He has succeeded in finding an urban area that had no dearth of crime and homicide statistics and records. Adler has reviewed a total of 2,118 homicide cases during the interwar period, and his primary source materials serve as a valuable foundation for any examination of criminal justice in New Orleans. He also expands his view beyond the courts, analyzing other diverse records such as coroners' records and newspapers. Utilizing this fantastically cohesive body of primary sources, Adler helps explain the origins of the current incarceration crisis, which most assuredly rest in the interwar period. -- The Journal of Southern History Carefully researched and well written. -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History This most interesting book is a brilliant companion to an understanding of many elements of crime and the response to crime, not simply in interwar New Orleans but also more generally in America in this period. -- The Critic Adler illuminates the experience of homicide in one of the most violent American cities as it moved from the Roaring Twenties through the depressed 1930s. The rates and nature of murder, and responses to it, reflected changing conceptions of honor and justice, migration patterns, economics, household structure, gender roles, and technology, with the only constants being racial difference and tight white dominance. This is a model of social history, its conclusions often surprising and always insightful. -- Roger Lane, author of Murder in America: A History Masterfully exploiting New Orleans' rich police records, Adler forces us to rethink the origins of the racialized war on crime. Jim Crow criminal justice flowered in New Orleans in the 1930s and 1940s, despite a sustained fall in the city's historically high homicide rates. Yet the decline in murder did not stay the hand of rough justice, as white New Orleanians came to associate African Americans with street violence and robbery. Adler shows how, in conflating race control and crime control, New Orleans' unusually hard-boiled policing anticipated the mass arrest and incarceration practices of our own time. -- David T. Courtwright, author of Violent Land Murder in New Orleans is an important case study of racism in pre-World War II criminal justice that reveals how the past bleeds into the present. -- Tony Platt, University of California, Berkeley In this ambitious urban history, Adler authoritatively reconstructs the racist and violent policing forces in the Crescent City--he seems to leave no document unturned, unanalyzed, or uncontextualized. Prodigiously researched, Murder in New Orleans demonstrates that we must look to cities like New Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s if we hope to discover the origins of the nation's current carceral state. -- Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning Recommended. . . Murder in New Orleans reads like the script for a documentary film. -- Choice