Prisons and Penitentiaries

Prisons and Penitentiaries. Perhaps the most critical fact about the origins of the penitentiary in the United States is a frank recognition that the institution does have a history. Prisons were not always the central feature of the American criminal justice system, an inevitable and logical method for punishing unlawful actions. Rather, beginning in the early nineteenth century, Americans, with some debt to the English, invented the prison, and it has been a fixture of American life ever since.

In the Colonial Era, a wide range of punishments existed, none of which included extended periods of incarceration. The colonists levied penalties of fines, whippings, and public shaming (in the stocks). They relied even more heavily on banishment, assuming that those who committed a crime and were not legal residents of the town were best sent on their way, whatever the consequences for the next town down the road. The local jails were reserved for those who were either awaiting trial, or who had been convicted but not yet punished; the jails were ancillary to punishment, not its core. And of course, the colonists used the gallows, executing not only those guilty of capital crimes but repeat offenders as well. In effect, the system of punishment oscillated between the lenient and the harsh, with nothing in between.

In the decades following independence, Americans struggled to devise new modes of criminal sanctions. Capital punishment seemed an unacceptable relic of monarchical governments, out of place in a republic. (As Benjamin Rush remarked: “An execution in a republic is like a human sacrifice in religion.”) Moreover, capital punishment seemed not only wrong but ineffective. The harsher the punishment, the more likely that American jurors would exonerate the guilty, and thereby reduce its deterrent effects. At the same time, banishment appeared altogether inappropriate. Now that citizens thought not only in terms of their locality but of their state and nation, it made no sense simply to pass the criminal along.

But what then to do? How should crime be punished? In the 1790s and early 1800s, the idea emerged to have the offender serve time behind bars. The prison would serve the purpose of incapacitation; during the period of confinement, the offender would not be able to commit further offenses. But the system did not work as intended. Riots and break‐outs occurred, and no one was satisfied that the prisons were meeting the challenge of crime. However, rather than being abandoned, the prison experiment took on new life. Beginning in the 1830s, incarceration acquired a grander function: to reform the criminal and return him to society as a law‐abiding citizen.

The idea was a curious, if long‐lasting, one. It is by no means apparent why a period of confinement should rehabilitate an offender. But the Jacksonians had a ready answer, and one that had enormous appeal not only in the United States, but abroad. The prison was to be structured as a kind of model society, with an internal organization marked by the discipline and order that was so lacking in the outside society. Would‐be reformers were convinced that the roots of crime were to be found in the weakness of traditional institutions, including the family, the church, the school, and the community itself. The prison would substitute for them, inculcating habits of obedience that the offenders had not learned before. Accordingly, the new prisons, as designed primarily in New York (the so‐called Auburn, Sing‐Sing, or congregate system) or in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (the so‐called Pennsylvania or separate system), established very fixed and steady routines for inmates.

A surprisingly fierce debate broke out on the merits of the two systems, even though in retrospect they seem far more similar than different. In New York, inmates slept one to a cell but worked and ate together; in Pennsylvania, inmates slept, ate, and worked alone in continuous solitary confinement. To the New York systems’ defenders, the solitary life of the Pennsylvania system seemed so excessive as to drive inmates mad; to Pennsylvania's defenders, the New York system allowed inmates to corrupt one another. But both systems relied upon a bell‐ringing regularity to inculcate discipline and order. At the sound of a bell, the men woke; another bell signaled mealtime; still another, work time; still another, meals and bedtime. The only book allowed into the cells was the Bible, and the only visitors, those who would promote religious beliefs.

Around this program, state after state built large, expensive, and isolated institutions, embracing the idea that prisons would reform inmates. Indeed, this promise gave the prisons or penitentiaries, as they were now often called, enormous legitimacy, making them the pride, not the shame, of the new republic. Europeans viewed the American prisons in this very light. Alexis de Tocqueville came to America, along with his collaborator Gustave de Beaumont, not to write Democracy in America but to study its prisons and make recommendations to the French government.

What happened to the dream of rehabilitation? It persisted long after it had become apparent that the prisons were not meeting the ideal. By the 1850s, and even more clearly by the 1880s and 1890s, the prisons were overcrowded, with several inmates to a cell; brutal, with guards inflicting harsh punishments upon inmates; and corrupt, with favors and special treatment bought and sold. But few objected to the decline of the prison system, or used it as the occasion to think about alternatives. Part of the reason is that institutions once legitimated are hard to topple. To this day, there are those who believe that incarceration can reform. Part of the reason, too, was the changing characteristics of the prisoners themselves. By the mid‐nineteenth century, the inmates were predominantly Irish Americans. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, they were predominantly Eastern European. In the late twentieth century, they were disproportionately African American. In effect, prison populations became minority populations, and in the process the institutions seemed less in need of improvement than expansion. They might not be rehabilitative, the reasoning went, but that was the fault of the prisoner, not of the system. All the while, prisons and penitentiaries did confine a troublesome and dangerous class and thereby justified their centrality to punishment.
See also Antebellum Era; Early Republic, Era of the; Immigration; Police; Poverty.

Bibliography

W. David Lewis , From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796–1848, 1965.
David J. Rothman , The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, 1971.
Margaret Calahan , Trends in Incarceration in the United States Since 1880, Crime and Delinquency 24, no. 1, 1979.
Bradley Chapin , Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606–1660, 1983.
Edward L. Ayers , Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth‐Century American South, 1984.
Herbert A. Johnson , A History of Criminal Justice, 1988.
Norvall Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison, 1995.
David Ray Papke , Crime and Punishment, in Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams, eds., Encyclopedia of American Social History, III, pp.2073–87, 1993.

David J. Rothman