Research

Dr. Boudreau’s main research interest is the history of crime and the criminal justice system. He and UNB professor Greg Marquis launched a website to explore the history of crime and punishment in New Brunswick, from the time of earliest European settlement until recent decades.

Current Research Project

Dr. Boudreau’s current research is on executions and the debate over capital Punishment in New Brunswick between the years 1869 and 1957. Between 1869 and 1957, twenty-six (26) New Brunswick residents were executed for the capital crime of murder, all of whom were men. This project will address three key themes with regards to these executions. 

First, all of these cases were automatically reviewed by the federal Department of Justice to decide if the convicted person’s death sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment.  During the course of the Department’s investigation, the issue of the sanity of the accused was raised in several of these cases.  This project will examine the debate over the mental competency of the accused at the time of the murders and the power that the state possessed to determine not only the “sanity” of a convicted criminal, but whether or not they lived or died.  

Secondly, this project will explore the discourse surrounding rural Maritimers as “beasts of the field” which surfaced during the debate over the sanity of the accused; a discourse that was particularly prominent in the 1920s and 1930s.  

And third, the controversial nature of some of these executions (notably the botched hanging of Bennie Swim in 1922, which meant that Mr. Swim was hanged a second time), reveals that moral opposition to hanging, and to the efficacy of capital punishment, was growing in some parts of New Brunswick throughout the twentieth century.

Recent Publication

Dr. Michael Boudreau's latest book, City of Order: Crime and Society in Halifax, 1918-35, looks at how inter-war 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.