The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941

Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society

by Rebecca McLennan

In the Age of Jackson, private enterprise set up shop in the American penal system. Working hand in glove with state government, contractors in both the North and the South would go on to put more than half a million imprisoned men, women, and youth to hard, sweated toil for private gain by 1900. Held captive, stripped of their rights, and subject to lash and paddle, convict laborers churned out vast quantities of goods and revenue, in some years generating the equivalent of more than $30 billion worth of work. By the 1880s, however, a growing mass of Americans came to regard the prison labor system as immoral and unbefitting of a free it fostered torture and other abuses, degraded free citizen-workers, corrupted government and the legal system, and stifled the supposedly ethical purposes of punishment. The Crisis of Imprisonment tells the remarkable story of this controversial system of penal ―how it came into being, how it worked, how the popular campaigns for its abolition were ultimately victorious, and how it shaped and continues to haunt the American penal system. The author takes the reader into the morally vital world of nineteenth-century artisans, industrial workers, farmers, clergy, convicts, machine politicians, and labor leaders and shows how prisons became a lightning rod in a determined defense of republican and Christian values against the encroachments of an unbridled market capitalism. She explores the vexing ethical questions that prisons posed then and remain exigent What are the limits of state power over the minds, bodies, and souls of citizens and others―is torture permissible under certain circumstances? What, if anything, makes the state morally fit to deprive a person of life or liberty? Are prisoners slaves and, if so, by what right? Should prisoners work? Is the prison a morally defensible institution? The eventual abolition of prison labor contracting plunged the prisons into deep fiscal and ideological crisis. The second half of the book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Progressive Era prison reform as, above all, a response to this crisis. It concludes with an exploration of the long-range impact of both penal servitude and the anti-prison labor movement on the modern American penal system.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

520 pages, Paperback

First published March 4, 2007

Reviews

[Limnisse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This excellent book has been awarded three top awards in American Legal History.

1) John Phillip Reid Book Award, American Society for Legal History (2009)

2) Cromwell Book Prize in American Legal History (2009):

"McLennan sheds new light on the history of prisons and punishments from the early republic through the Progressive era by focusing on convict labor. She brings into sharp focus the complex and changing relationship between punishment, work, politics, and economics. The tensions between the conflicting goals of discipline, penitence, and profit provoked clashes between prison administrators, penal reformers, and inmates. McLennan successfully strikes a balance many historians seek but few achieve between granting agency to those who lack access to conventional forms of power and identifying the very real limits of that agency. Even after Progressive era reforms abolished prisoners' involuntary servitude and replaced it with an incentivized system of behavioral rewards and punishments, the penal system still sought to profit from the unfree while preparing them for freedom. McLennan's 'crisis of imprisonment' persists."

3) Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society, American Historical Association (2008):

"This detailed study of prisons, punishment, and convict labor fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the history of penology. Concentrating on an in-depth analysis of New York state prisons, McLennan traces the rise and fall of contract prison labor, drawing the connections between this brutal system and the larger political economic context with great theoretical sophistication."

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[Nickel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Defeated