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

This book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of American penal history between the Revolution and World War II.

Rebecca M. McLennan (Author)

9780521830966, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 March 2008

520 pages
23.4 x 15.5 x 3.5 cm, 0.8 kg

"In a nation dedicated to liberty, the topic of the imprisoned deserves attention and the considerate analysis exhibited in this book. Essential." -Choice

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Crime & criminology [JKV], History of the Americas [HBJK]