The Crisis of Imprisonment
The Crisis of Imprisonment
America's prison-based system of punishment has not always enjoyed the widespread political and moral legitimacy it has today. In this groundbreaking reinterpretation of penal history, Rebecca McLennan covers the periods of deep instability, popular protest, and political crisis that characterized early American prisons. She details the debates surrounding prison reform, including the limits of state power, the influence of market forces, the role of unfree labor, and the 'just deserts' of wrongdoers. McLennan also explores the system that existed between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, where private companies relied on prisoners for labor. Finally, she discusses the rehabilitation model that has primarily characterized the penal system in the twentieth century. Unearthing fresh evidence from prison and state archives, McLennan shows how, in each of three distinct periods of crisis, widespread dissent culminated in the dismantling of old systems of imprisonment.
- Was the first systematic reinterpretation of American penal history in more than a generation
- Uses fresh archival evidence not consulted by other historians
- A comprehensive examination of previous crises and reforms
Reviews & endorsements
"Deeply researched and deeply reflective, The Crisis of Imprisonment redefines the central themes of 19th and early 20th century American prison history. Its story of the rise and fall of contractual penal servitude shows how questions of imprisonment, prison labor, and the treatment of prisoners lay at the heart of ongoing struggles over the meaning of freedom and unfreedom in America. Few scholars have succeeded so well in tracing the reciprocal relations between the institutions of punishment and the broader fields of economic and political power with which they are connected. Written with clarity and conviction, this is a major new work on the formation of the American penal state." - David Garland, New York University
"Although there have been several fine studies of the thinking and influence of American prison reformers, McLennan has written a revealing study of the impact of popular politics, and especially of the prisoners themselves on the shaping and reshaping of state prison systems. She helps us understand the huge prison business of our times by analyzing controversies and prison revolts that led first to the development of contract prison labor then to its abolition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." - David Montgomery, Yale University
"A timely, penetrating look into the horrors of the nineteenth-century prison system, its brutal—and brutalizing—convict labor system, and the mass of ordinary Americans who confronted its abuses and, ultimately, brought about its abolition." - Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents
"This is an extraordinary investigation and analysis of penal servitude and anti-prison labor campaigns in American history. Wonderfully insightful and illuminating, this work has much to teach us about where we've been and what we must consider in confronting the politics of legal punishment." - Bryan Stevenson, New York University School of Law, Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative
"One of the smartest books about punishment I have ever read. And this is not just a book about prisons. The story Rebecca McLennan narrates so powerfully in these pages—the controversial career of penal servitude in a liberal democratic republic--has much to tell us about the history of American society, politics, and institutions." - Michael Willrich, Brandeis University, author of City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago
"In a nation dedicated to liberty, the topic of the imprisoned deserves attention and the considerate analysis exhibited in this book. Essential." -Choice
Product details
March 2008Paperback
9780521537834
520 pages
226 × 151 × 29 mm
0.69kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: the grounds of legal punishment
- 1. Strains of servitude: legal punishment in the early republic
- 2. Due convictions: contractual penal servitude and its discontents
- 3. Commerce upon the throne: the business of imprisonment in Gilded Age America
- 4. Disciplining the state, civilizing the market: the abolition of contract prison labor
- 5. A model servitude: prison reform in the early progressive era
- 6. Uses of the state: dialectics of reform in early progressive New York
- 7. American Bastille: Sing Sing and the political crisis of imprisonment
- 8. Changing the subject: the metamorphosis of prison reform in the high progressive era
- 9. Laboratory of social justice: the new penologists at Sing Sing
- 10. Punishment without labor: towards the modern penal state
- Conclusion: on the crises of imprisonment.
