Dr. Boudreau Releases Book on Crime and Society in Halifax, 1918 to 1935

 

Published: Monday, Jun 4, 2012

Dr. Michael Boudreau has released his new book, City of Order: Crime and Society in Halifax, 1918-35 through UBC Press. An official launch of City of Order will be held at St. Thomas University in the fall. 

The book looks at how 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.

To create a bulwark against further social dislocation, citizens, policy makers, and officials modernized the city’s machinery of order – courts, prisons, and the police force – and placed greater emphasis on crime control. These tough-on-crime measures, Boudreau argues in this work, did not resolve problems, but rather singled out ethnic minorities, working-class men, and female and juvenile offenders as problem figures in the eternal quest for order.

“Historians have given inadequate attention to the history of the criminal justice system in the twentieth century. City of Order offers the first detailed case study of the interwar justice system. It makes a significant contribution not only to legal history scholarship but also to the history of Halifax.” – R. Blake Brown, Department of History, Saint Mary’s University