With Liberty For Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America

by Scott Christianson

From Columbus' voyages to the New World through today's prison expansion movements, incarceration has played an important, yet disconcerting, role in American history. In this sweeping examination of imprisonment in the United States over five centuries, Scott Christianson exposes the hidden record of the nation's prison heritage, illuminating the forces underlying the paradox of a country that sanctifies individual liberty while it continues to build and maintain a growing complex of totalitarian institutions.

Based on exhaustive research and the author's insider's knowledge of the criminal justice system, With Liberty for Some provides an absorbing, well-written chronicle of imprisonment in its many forms. Interweaving his narrative with the moving, often shocking, personal stories of the prisoners themselves and their keepers, Christianson considers convict transports to the colonies; the international trade in captive indentured servants, slaves, and military conscripts; life under slavery; the transition from colonial jails to model state prisons; the experience of domestic prisoners of war and political prisoners; the creation of the penitentiary; and the evolution of contemporary corrections. His penetrating study of this broad spectrum of confinement reveals that slavery and prisons have been inextricably linked throughout American history. He also examines imprisonment within the context of the larger society.

With Liberty for Some is a thought-provoking work that will shed new light on the ways in which imprisonment has shaped the American experience. As the author writes, "Prison is the black flower of civilization -- a durable weed that refuses to die."

Genres: Nonfiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 1998

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the most part, this is precisely the book I was looking for when I began doing research on the subject of the history of imprisonment in the United States (and other countries).  Although the history of prisons and the history of slavery are often viewed separate from each other, there are a few works that put the two subjects together and view them in a particular context.  For example, when we examine the gulag and archipelagos of Soviet Russia and Communist China, or talk about the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, it is impossible to avoid dealing with the combination of imprisonment and slavery as an aspect of social control in which a totalitarian regime sought to deal with enemies within.  Throughout its own entire history, the United States has been either the prison in which the empire of England (and then the United Kingdom) dealt with social control within, or a nation that has relied upon both slavery and imprisonment as a means of social control of a restive and potentially rebellious group of populations, most notably involving ethnic minorities as well as America's criminal class and political agitators who remain internal enemies to this day.  This book deals thoughtfully with these connections.

At just over 300 pages of core material (and a lot of endnotes), this book is divided into eight large chapters that deal with both a great deal of detail about the connections between slavery and imprisonment and a whole host of other social concerns but that also look at the cosmic cope of such matters.  The author begins with a discussion of the prisoner trade (1) during the colonial period and the problems faced with imprisonment in England as well as the control of such people and their integration into colonial society, and the way that it was tied to indentured servitude and early slavery.  After that the author discusses the way that the colonial period showed American society to be growing into a land of prisoners and keepers, which it has remained (2).  There is a look at the prisoners of the revolution, whether Tory or Patriot, and how that influenced the creation of more prisons on American soil in times of war (3), and also the way that early Republican prisons sought to control prisoners in silence without completely breaking them in the big house (4).  The author turns to scandals and periodic efforts at reform (5), discusses the late 19th and early 20th century as the golden age of political prisoners (6), and discusses what it meant in the middle of the 20th century for people to do time (7).  Finally, the author comes full circle (8) and discusses the disproportionate effects of prison on different parts of the American population and discusses the enduring popularity of prisons for a variety of complex social causes.

What the reader is left with at the end is a very complex set of feelings about the entanglement that has resulted thanks to the history and course of slavery and imprisonment within the United States.  To a large degree, American social cohesion has always involved a great deal of hostility towards internal enemies--political enemies, minorities, criminal populations who prey on their neighbors--and that certainly remains true now.  The cost of prisons and their popularity in politically important rural parts of the country (as well as their profit to political and economic elites) makes it difficult for society to spend a great deal of money on other priorities like health and education.  Imprisonment encourages a fictitious belief in debts owed to society (rather than the obligations that institutions have towards us) and has greatly distorted family life and created a hardened criminal class which has lived in inhumane conditions and whose unpaid labor still provides profits to some while undercutting wages for others.  Yet even those of us who are hostile to prison as a method of social control are faced with the question of what we can do about it, when slavery and imprisonment and abortion and other forms of population control all point to larger and still existent social problems that we are loath to resolve, and sometimes even to admit.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great examination of how legal controls on Blacks have evolved, from state-backed slavery, to penal labor, to segregation in society and in prison, to disproportionate policing and sentencing. It's a tale of progress, from the horrific to the simply unfair.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished this not too long ago... Fantastic overview of the transition from chattel to penal slavery.