Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America

Abstract

Jen Manion's book examines how, in the wake of the American Revolution, the new American states, rejecting the “bloody code” of the mother country, addressed the issue of reforming their systems of punishment in accordance with enlightenment thinking and liberal reform. What they achieved, however, argues Manion, was a harsh regime of punishment centered on the penitentiary and a system of incarceration for minor offenders driven (though not explicitly) by “ideas about race, gender and sexuality” and intended to shore up the social order threatened by a growing underclass (p. 5). The purpose of the penitentiary was to reform the criminal by means of lengthy sentences, during which time inmates were expected to contemplate their situation, repent the errors of their ways, turn to work as therapy, and prepare to return to, and survive in, the world outside the prison. Classification and segregation were part of the process. By focusing on the punishment meted out to selected groups—immigrants, African Americans, and the poor—Manion moves discussions of change away from an earlier emphasis on felony and the death penalty to misdemeanors such as vagrancy and petty theft. The focus on small-scale offenders is new, and the extraordinary punishments to which they were subjected cries out for explanation. The prison, it would appear, was to be the sole solution to all such peoples and problems. Prison sentences were handed out in years rather than months, though inmates, unless they were African Americans, might be released well before their terms expired. Manion examines not only the punishments imposed on minor offenders but also the agency of prisoners, the conditions within prisons, the corruption of warders, keepers, guards, and others, the sexual behavior of inmates, and the exploitation of women and youthful prisoners. Liberty's Prisoners is based on the author's dissertation on women and crime in Pennsylvania, and that state lies at the heart of this extended study. Coverage of other states is patchy, though the heated rivalry between New York and Pennsylvania over prison architecture and discipline (which really belongs to a later period) is fleetingly discussed. The legacy of such a system, the author concludes, is all too obvious today.

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