“[b]uilding trust and nurturing legitimacy on both sides of the police-citizen divide is not only the first pillar of this task force’s report but also the foundational principle underlying this inquiry into the nature of relations between law enforcement and the communities they serve.” Its first recommendation was that “[l]aw enforcement culture should embrace a guardian mindset to build public trust and legitimacy. Toward that end, police and sheriffs’ departments should adopt procedural justice as the guiding principle for internal and external policies and practices to guide their interactions with the citizens they serv

Review police operations in the ghetto to ensure proper conduct by police officers, and eliminate abrasive practices; • Provide more adequate police protection to ghetto residents to eliminate their high sense of insecurity, and the belief of many Negro citizens in the existence of a dual standard of law enforcement; • Establish fair and effective mechanisms for the redress of grievances against the police, and other municipal employees; • Develop and adopt policy guidelines to assist officers in making critical decisions in areas where police conduct can create tension; • Develop and use innovative programs to ensure widespread community support for law enforcement; • Recruit more Negroes into the regular police force, and review promotion policies to ensure fair promotion for Negro officers; • Establish a “Community Service Officer” program to attract ghetto youths

he St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McClulloch explained that physical evidence and the most credible witness testimony indicated that as Brown charged at Wilson, the officer fired five shots

in which “the trial was held immediately . . . [and] the jury [was] composed of frontiersmen . . . free from legal niceties.”11 The trial of Work, Burr, and Thompson was also therefore a trial for Missouri’s emergent system of criminal justice; it was widely known that if the court failed to return a harsh sentence the defendants would be taken from the courthouse by a mob and hanged. According to Thompson’s memoir, “The infuriated mob, with their faces all Blackened, had prepared the gallows, and even the ropes.”12 When their sentences were announced, the courtroom erupted with declarations that the citizens had “got clear of mobbing them.”13 The convictions demonstrated the security of the state’s claim to punishment, but the culture of extralegal authority still demanded that the state appoint a group of one hundred men to safely transport the prisoners to the state penitentiary.14 Despite the victory of law, the Missouri legislature passed an 1845 statute requiring a minimum prison sentence of seven years for grand

Missouri consolidated the power of its proslavery legal architecture with the successful prosecution of the white abolitionists Alanson Work, James Burr, and George Thompson in a case that illustrated the legal contradictions of slave law and its relationship to punishment. The three Illinois missionaries had crossed into Missouri for a “tour of mercy.” When they enticed a group of slaves to run away, the group they approached assumed they were slave traders and alerted authorities, who arrested, tried, and incarcerated Work, Burr, and Thompson.9 Although Missouri’s initial strategy was to try the abolitionists for larceny, the defense successfully argued that abolition could not constitute larceny because larceny required an intention to convert stolen property into personal property. When the state reduced the charges to stealing, attempting to steal, and intending to attempt to steal, the men were convicted and given twelve-year sentences in the penitentiary.

In 1835, a new criminal code set a minimum prison sentence of two years for stealing slaves and required Black people to register in local precincts to receive freedom licenses.8 Unlicensed freedom was a criminal offense for Black residents in the state of Missouri.

“the slaveholder’s prison” because it housed forty-two Black and white abolitionists from the 1830s until the 1860s and because it was used by private slaveholders to preemptively detain slaves who might escape

Missouri’s jurisprudence of slavery was rooted in its relationship to prisons and criminal law. The prison was built to regulate slavery and criminalize abolition, which it did through a series of provisions for the punishment of “larceny.”6 Like other states with relatively large Black populations, Missouri used the relationship between prisons and slavery to develop racialized mechanisms of control for both free and enslaved Black people that included licensure, spatial regulation, and criminal law.

whip handle with five strands of raw hide attached to it.”6 Illinois practiced forced standing with “the hands put through the grated door and handcuffed on the outside.”7 Federal prisoners in Ohio’s state prison experienced “ducking,” which involved a “stream of water directed from a hose with some force upon the naked person,” and “the slide,” an “arrangement by which the convict is drawn up by the wrists, handcuffed till he stands on tip toe.”8 In West Virginia, where substantial numbers of federal prisoners were held, discipline was governed by the lash, the shoo fly (a “frame work made of wood with slots for the prisoner’s legs, hands and wrists”) and the bull ring (a “ring fastened in the wall considerably above the floor to which the prisoner is drawn by his wrists”).9

Leavenworth, Kansas, self-identifies as the nation’s original “Prison Town, U.S.A,”22 and the president of the local guard labor union boasts that “nobody’s been doing it longer or doing it better.”23 Billboards along various local highways invite travelers to “do time” in the city or to drink Hard Time Vodka. Brochures for heritage tourism beckon travelers with “How ’bout Doin’ Some Time in Leavenworth?” At the local antique mall, T-shirts represent Leavenworth as the nation’s expert on punishment, as the “University of Hard Time,” and while executions are no longer carried out at the prison, other shirts with symbols of the electric chair offer “Warm Regards” from Leavenworth. The local airport once sold bright orange T-shirts printed with “Property of Leavenworth Penitentiary” and children’s shirts that read “Future Guard.” It is an identity always on display in the exhibitions of two prison museums and in a town tourist circuit calle

replaced by the more mundane but no less important sound of the prison siren, which extended a full ten miles in each direction to warn of escapes. Local citizens were given printed cards with patterns of blasts as a kind of code. The escape signal was five blasts, fifteen seconds long with five seconds in between, a pattern that was repeated every ten minutes during an escape.

The US Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, was built in the 1890s as the nation’s first prison and the beginning of a federal prison system that radiates from the center of the nation.