Oppression Beyond Plantations: The Effect of Emancipation on Incarceration in Urban Buenos Aires

We estimate the effect of emancipation on the likelihood that formerly enslaved individuals were incarcerated in an urban setting—a context that lacked the economic incentives for incarceration present in plantation economies such as the US South. Focusing on early nineteenth-century Buenos Aires, we reconstruct the incarceration histories of the city’s residents as of 1810 by digitizing a full-count manuscript census and manually linking individuals to police records through 1830. To establish causality, we study a lottery that randomly granted certificates of freedom to a subset of enslaved persons. We find that emancipation increased the probability of incarceration by 11.8 percentage points. Evidence on mechanisms suggests that this effect was not driven by rural labor shortages but rather by the criminalization of petty offenses targeting the urban poor.