Historians have argued about the origins of the penitential reform movement. Enlightenment thought, urbanization, the Industrial Revolution, and bourgeois fear of social disorder have all been suggested as causes of this historical development. Historians can all agree that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, liberal republics shifted their major form of state punishment from public displays such as whippings to the incarceration of criminals in institutions.
The social movement to end public displays as the state’s primary form of punishment may have originated in 18th-century philosophical thought. Age of Enlightenment penal theorists influenced reformers and state officials in late 18th-century America. Cesare Beccaria, who wrote An Essay on Crimes and Punishments (1764), advocated the consistency of punishment through a standard criminal code and the eradication of arbitrary punishment. Whipping, stocks, and other public humiliations had been effective methods in small, close-knit communities, but in rapidly growing urban areas with rising crime rates, developing a uniform punishment system was more efficient and manageable.
These new theories and the increasing level of disorder in urban centers influenced city officials to eradicate public punishments and build a new kind of system for dealing with crime. Philadelphia, for example, ceased public whipping for punishments in 1786 and instituted penal labor as the primary punishment for crime. When Philadelphia officials decided that chain-gang labor on public works did not properly reform the criminals to lead virtuous lives as good citizens, the idea of placing criminals in institutions began to gain support. The noted physician Benjamin Rush, for example, advocated the cessation of all public punishment, believing that this interaction with the citizenry would contaminate the public morals. In 1787, he published a pamphlet, An Enquiring into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals and upon Society, which criticized current state punishments. He believed that public executions and punishments degraded both the criminal and the spectators. Social reformers like Rush supported the institutionalization of criminals, believing that a highly structured program of organized activity could encourage repentance and develop the virtue needed for citizens in the new republic.
Prison reformers adopted the practice of social isolation as a technique for the moral rehabilitation of inmates. Early jails tended to be lightly monitored, with the prisoners largely governing themselves; they could often mingle freely, and their families could visit them regularly. Because the penitential reformers viewed the origins of criminal behavior as arising from corrupting social influences, the movement’s proponents insisted on separating criminals from society and isolating them from their families and friends. For reformers who believed that virtue was rooted in individual responsibility and religious devotion, the goals of the penitential movement were ideologically appealing. Americans involved in this movement included such well-known reformers as Dorothea Dix and Louis Dwight.
As states with growing cities and populations, New York and Pennsylvania would lead the nation in developing new ways to punish criminals. The prison reforms adopted by these two states were later embraced by other states with some modifications. The Jacksonian era introduced the construction of large penitentiaries. In 1829, Pennsylvania opened the Eastern State Penitentiary, the first large institution designed by supporters of penitential reformers. This institution aimed to inculcate virtue through isolation, silence, and religious instruction. The architects who designed Eastern State carefully arranged the structure to facilitate this separation of prisoners, even during exercise and eating periods.
A debate emerged between social reformers who advocated the Pennsylvania system of incarceration and those who supported the treatment of prisoners in New York institutions. This debate centered around the degree of solitude institutions should require of prisoners. The New York system allowed prisoners to labor outside of their cells in workshops with other inmates, although prison regulations still required silence. The Pennsylvania system, in contrast, advocated as much separation as possible, including solitary confinement. Both systems embodied the belief that prisoner isolation would lead criminals to atone for their past vices and absorb a new sense of morality. Letters from family and friends were carefully censored, and the prisoners were only allowed reading material that could be depended upon to teach them moral behavior. This carefully controlled environment and lack of communication with the outside world was supposed to both produce repentance and teach the inmate the steady work habits necessary to a successful American citizen.
The expense of separating prisoners and keeping the institutions carefully regulated was often difficult for other states to reproduce; most adopted only some aspects of the New York or Pennsylvania system. But the general model
This detail rendering of an iron gag is an attack on the cruelty in Pennsylvania's Eastern Penitentiary, a prison notorious for its abuses and atrocities against prisoners, 1835. (Library of Congress) of incarceration and separation was implemented throughout the country and remains a basic characteristic of the American criminal justice system to this day. The penitentiary reformers’ disciplinary strategies spurred the building of all sorts of other institutions, including asylums for the poor and the insane. The construction of these new kinds of institutions signified an expansion of the state’s power to control social behavior and punish those who deviated from established norms.
See also CITIES AND URBAN LIFE.
Further reading: Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
—Sharon E. Romeo
World History
