City of Order

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, 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.