ABSTRACT
The police enforce the state's understanding of good and bad behavior, of the criminal versus the upstanding citizen. Every generation of the marginalized, easily criminalized, has been more than aware of the fragility of their standing. While state-condoned surveillance varies in that it reflects the priorities of a given society, location, and time period, what is clear from the history of the United States is that skin color has been the most stable marker of who is and is surveilled. In the case of large plantation agriculture, it was the for-profit industrialized setting that created the need for brutal and racialized over-seeing. Plantation agriculture in the nineteenth century required back-breaking, sun-up to sun-down labor. Boston and New York offer good examples of how ethnic groups, particularly the Irish, positioned themselves as the surveil-ers in the urban and immigrant context of the late nineteenth century.
