There were no chain-link fences topped with razor wire, no panoptic guard towers, and no orange-clad inmates. Yet, Franciscan missionaries and their military allies operated a system of twenty-one California missions that echo from colonial past into carceral present. They sometimes used force to bring California Indians to the missions. Once there, missionaries and their military allies increasingly confined them, imposed strict rules, regimented their movements, and exploited their labor. Surveillance became common, sexual violence a problem, and corporal punishment a means of control. In response, thousands of California Indians resisted. They escaped, attacked their captors, and organized uprisings while their home communities sometimes tried to eject the colonizers. Franciscans and their military allies increasingly responded with additional, sometimes lethal, force. All of this they did in the name of reform: the transformation of tens of thousands of Indigenous people into baptized Catholic workers.
Over time, California missions came to impose a system of penal servitude, or imprisonment with forced labor. Eyewitnesses and scholars have repeatedly noted the missions’ imposition of policies strikingly similar to both slavery and incarceration. Indeed, these two categories often blur. Franciscans could not legally buy and sell California Indians. Thus the system cannot be strictly defined as legalized chattel slavery. Still, as missions spread, Francis-cans came to hold California Indians as unfree laborers while seeking to morally transform them. Franciscans described California Indians as children. Yet, they often treated them more like slaves or criminals. The missions thus exhibited characteristics of both systems but were most like penal servitude. California missions were not modern prisons.
--from "California’s First Mass Incarceration System Franciscan Missions, California Indians, and Penal Servitude, 1769–1836" by Dr. Benjamin Madley, Associate Professor at UCLA: historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history.
