History Of United States Prison Systems

Imprisonment began to replace other forms of criminal punishment in the United States just before the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed as early as the first sovereign states. In colonial times, courts and magistrates would impose punishments including fines, forced labor, public restraint, flogging, maiming, and death, with sheriffs detaining some defendants awaiting trial. The use of confinement as a punishment in itself was originally seen as a more humane alternative to capital and corporal punishment, especially among Quakers in Pennsylvania. Prison building efforts in the United States came in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian Era and led to the widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, bringing a number of new mechanisms—such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing—into the mainstream of American penal practice. Finally, since the early 1970s, the United States has engaged in a historically unprecedented expansion of its imprisonment systems at both the federal and state level. Since 1973, the number of incarcerated persons in the United States has increased five-fold. Now, about 2,200,000 people, or 3.2 percent of the adult population, are imprisoned in the United States,Gottschalk, 1–2. and about 7,000,000 are under supervision of some form in the correctional system, including parole and probation. Periods of prison construction and reform produced major changes in the structure of prison systems and their missions, the responsibilities of federal and state agencies for administering and supervising them, as well as the legal and political status of prisoners themselves.

Intellectual origins of United States prisons

Incarceration as a form of criminal punishment is "a comparatively recent episode in Anglo-American jurisprudence," according to historian Adam J. Hirsch.Hirsch, xi. Before the nineteenth century, sentences of penal confinement were rare in the criminal courts of British North America. But penal incarceration had been utilized in England as early as the reign of the Tudors, if not before.Hirsch, 13. When post-revolutionary prisons emerged in the United States, they were, in Hirsch's words, not a "fundamental departure" from the former American colonies' intellectual past.Hirsch, 31. Early American prisons systems like Massachusetts' Castle Island Penitentiary, built in 1780, essentially imitated the model of the 1500s English workhouse.

Prisons in America

Although early colonization of prisons were influenced by the England law and Sovereignty and their reactions to criminal offenses, it also had a mix of religious aptitude toward the punishment of the crime. Because of the low population in the eastern states it was hard to follow the criminal codes in place and which led to law changes in America. It was the population boom in the eastern states that led to the reformation of the prison system in the U.S. According to the Oxford History of the Prison, in order to function prisons "keep prisoners in custody, maintain order, control discipline and a safe environment, provide decent conditions for prisoners and meet their needs, including health care, provide positive regimes which help prisoners address their offending behavior and allow them as full responsible a life as possible and help prisoners prepare for their return to their community"

Incarcerating prisoners has long been an idea in the history of man. U.S prisons adopted some ideas from history when it came to confining criminals. According to Bruce Johnston, "of course the notion of forcibly confining people is ancient, and there is extensive evidence that the Romans had a well developed system for imprisoning different types of offenders" It wasn't until 1789 when reform started taking place in America. David J. Rothman suggests that it was the freedom of our independence that helped along the reformation of the law. Laws were changed in New York because they were too "barbarous and had Monarchial principles," according to Rothman. Pennsylvania laws had changed, excluding the act of robbery and burglary from crimes punishable by death, leaving only first degree murder. New York, New Jersey, and Virginia updated and reduced their capital crime lists. This reduction of capital crimes created a need for other forms of punishment, which led to incarceration of longer periods of time. The oldest prison was built in York, Maine in 1720. The very first jail that turned into a state prison was the Walnut Street Jail. This led to uprisings of state prisons across the eastern border states of America. Newgate State Prison in Greenwich Village was built in 1796, New Jersey added its prison facility in 1797, Virginia and Kentucky in 1800, and Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maryland followed soon after.

Americans were in favour of reform in the early 1800s. They had ideas that rehabilitating prisoners to become law-abiding citizens was the next step. They needed to change the prison system's functions. Jacksonian American reformers hoped that changing the way they developed the institutions would give the inmates the tools needed to change. Auburn state prison became the first prison to implement the rehabilitative idea. The function of the prison was to isolate, teach obedience, and use labor for the means of production through the inmates. According to Rothman, "Reform, not deterrence, was now the aim of incarceration." Soon a rivalry plan stepped into place through the Pennsylvania model which functioned almost the same as the Auburn model except for eliminating human contact. This meant that inmates were incarcerated in cells alone, ate alone, and could only see approved visitors.

The development of prisons changed from the 1800s to the modern day era. As of 1990 there were over 750,000 people held in state prison or county jails. Prisons hadn't been designed to house such a high number of incarcerated individuals. With the development of new material and ideas, prisons changed physically to accommodate the rising population. Although the prison maintained the high wall method, it added new modern technology such as surveillance and electronically monitored perimeters, and changed the way prisons are operated. The change of prison operating system has led to branching prisons off into multiple factors to meet the needs of the incarcerated population. Norval Morris in The Contemporary Prison writes "there are 'open prisons'... 'weekend prisons' and 'day prisons'." This is not to say the change of punishment has completely changed in redevelopment of the early prison system. It still maintains social order and is moved by politics and ever changing matters.

The English workhouse

The English workhouse, an intellectual forerunner of early United States penitentiaries, was first developed as a "cure" for the idleness of the poor. Over time English officials and reformers came to see the workhouse as a more general system for rehabilitating criminals of all kinds.

Common wisdom in the England of the 1500s attributed property crime to idleness. "Idleness" had been a status crime since Parliament enacted the Statute of Laborers in the mid-fourteenth century. By 1530, English subjects convicted of leading a "Rogishe or Vagabonds Trade or Lyfe" were subject to whipping and mutilation, and recidivists could face the death penalty.

In 1557, many in England perceived that vagrancy was on the rise.Hirsch, 14; McKelvey, 3. That same year, the City of London reopened the Bridewell as a warehouse for vagrants arrested within the city limits. By order of any two of the Bridewell's governors, a person could be committed to the prison for a term of custody ranging from several weeks to several years.Hirsch, 14. In the decades that followed, "houses of correction" or "workhouses" like the Bridewell became a fixture of towns across England—a change made permanent when Parliament began requiring every county in the realm to build a workhouse in 1576.

The workhouse was not just a custodial institution. At least some of its proponents hoped that the experience of incarceration would rehabilitate workhouse residents through hard labor. Supporters expressed the belief that forced abstinence from "idleness" would make vagrants into productive citizens. Other supporters argued that the threat of the workhouse would deter vagrancy, and that inmate labor could provide a means of support for the workhouse itself. Governance of these institutions was controlled by written regulations promulgated by local authorities, and local justices of the peace monitored compliance.

Although "vagrants" were the first inhabitants of the workhouse—not felons or other criminals—expansion of its use to criminals was discussed. Sir Thomas More described in ''Utopia'' (1516) how an ideal government should punish citizens with slavery, not death, and expressly recommended use of penal enslavement in England.''See'' Hirsch, 16. Thomas Starkey, chaplain to Henry VIII, suggested that convicted felons "be put in some commyn work . . . so by theyr life yet the commyn welth schold take some profit." Edward Hext, justice of the peace in Somersetshire in the 1500s, recommended that criminals be put to labor in the workhouse after receiving the traditional punishments of the day.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several programs experimented with sentencing various petty criminals to the workhouse. Many petty criminals were sentenced to the workhouse by way of the vagrancy laws even before these efforts.Hirsch, 17. A commission appointed by King James I in 1622 to reprieve felons condemned to death with banishment to the American colonies was also given authority to sentence offenders "to toyle in some such heavie and painful manuall workes and labors here at home and be kept in chains in the house of correction or other places," until the King or his ministers decided otherwise. Within three years, a growing body of laws authorized incarceration in the workhouse for specifically enumerated petty crimes.

Throughout the 1700s, even as England's "Bloody Code" took shape, incarceration at hard labor was held out as an acceptable punishment for criminals of various kinds—''e.g.'', those who received a suspended death sentence via the benefit of clergy or a pardon, those who were not transported to the colonies, or those convicted of petty larceny. In 1779—at a time when the American Revolution had made convict transportation to North America impracticable—the English Parliament passed the Penitentiary Act, mandating the construction of two London prisons with internal regulations modeled on the Dutch workhouse—''i.e.'', prisoners would labor more or less constantly during the day, with their diet, clothing, and communication strictly controlled. Although the Penitentiary Act promised to make penal incarceration the focal point of English criminal law,Meranze, 141. a series of the penitentiaries it prescribed were never constructed.Hirsch, 18.

Despite the ultimate failure of the Penitentiary Act, however, the legislation marked the culmination of a series of legislative efforts that "disclose[] the . . . antiquity, continuity, and durability" of rehabilitative incarceration ideology in Anglo-American criminal law, according to historian Adam J. Hirsch. The first United States penitentiaries involved elements of the early English workhouses—hard labor by day and strict supervision of inmates.

English philanthropist penology

A second group that supported penal incarceration in England included clergymen and "lay pietists" of various religious denominations who made efforts during the 1700s to reduce the severity of the English criminal justice system. Initially, reformers like John Howard focused on the harsh conditions of pre-trial detention in English jails. But many philanthropists did not limit their efforts to jail administration and inmate hygiene; they were also interested in the spiritual health of inmates and curbing the common practice of mixing all prisoners together at random.Hirsch, 19. Their ideas about inmate classification and solitary confinement match another undercurrent of penal innovation in the United States that persisted into the Progressive Era.

Beginning with Samuel Denne's ''Letter to Lord Ladbroke'' (1771) and Jonas Hanway's ''Solitude in Imprisonment'' (1776), philanthropic literature on English penal reform began to concentrate on the post-conviction rehabilitation of criminals in the prison setting. Although they did not speak with a single voice, the philanthropist penologists tended to view crime as an outbreak of the criminal's estrangement from God. Hanway, for example, believed that the challenge of rehabilitating the criminal law lay in restoring his faith in, and fear of the Christian God, in order to "qualify imfor happiness in both worlds."

Many eighteenth-century English philanthropists proposed solitary confinement as a way to rehabilitate inmates morally. Since at least 1740, philanthropic thinkers touted the use of penal solitude for two primary purposes: (1) to isolate prison inmates from the moral contagion of other prisoners, and (2) to jump-start their spiritual recovery. The philanthropists found solitude far superior to hard labor, which only reached the convict's worldly self, failing to get at the underlying spiritual causes of crime. In their conception of prison as a "penitentiary," or place of repentance for sin, the English philanthropists departed from Continental models and gave birth to a largely novel idea—according to social historians Michael Meranze and Michael Ignatieff—which in turn found its way into penal practice in the United States.

A major political obstacle to implementing the philanthropists' solitary program in England was financial: Building individual cells for each prisoner cost more than the congregate housing arrangements typical of eighteenth-century English jails.Hirsch, 20. But by the 1790s, local solitary confinement facilities for convicted criminals appeared in Gloucestershire and several other English counties.

The philanthropists' focus on isolation and moral contamination became the foundation for early penitentiaries in the United States. Philadelphians of the period eagerly followed the reports of philanthropist reformer John Howard And the archetypical penitentiaries that emerged in the 1820s United States—''e.g.'', Auburn and Eastern State penitentiaries—both implemented a solitary regime aimed at morally rehabilitating prisoners. The concept of inmate classification—or dividing prisoners according to their behavior, age, etc.—remains in use in United States prisons to this day.

Rationalist penology

A third group involved in English penal reform were the "rationalists" or "utlitarians". According to historian Adam J. Hirsch, eighteenth-century rationalist criminology "rejected scripture in favor of human logic and reason as the only valid guide to constructing social institutions.

Eighteenth-century rational philosophers like Cesare Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham developed a "novel theory of crime"—specifically, that what made an action subject to criminal punishment was the harm it caused to other members of society.Hirsch, 21. For the rationalists, sins that did not result in social harm were outside the purview of civil courts. With John Locke's "sensational psychology" as a guide, which maintained that environment alone defined human behavior, many rationalists sought the roots of a criminal's behavior in his or her past environment.

Rationalists differed as to what environmental factors gave rise to criminality. Some rationalists, including Cesare Beccaria, blamed criminality on the ''uncertainty'' criminal punishment, whereas earlier criminologists had linked criminal deterrence to the ''severity'' of punishment. In essence, Beccaria believed that where arrest, conviction, and sentencing for crime were "rapid and infallible," punishments for crime could remain moderate. Beccaria did not take issue with the substance of contemporary penal codes—e.g., whipping and the pillory; rather, he took issue with their form and implementation.

Other rationalists, like Jeremy Bentham, believed that deterrence alone could not end criminality and looked instead to the social environment as the ultimate source of crime.Hirsch, 22. Bentham's conception of criminality led him to concur with philanthropist reformers on the need for rehabilitation of offenders. But, unlike the philanthropists, Bentham and like-minded rationalists believed the true goal of rehabilitation was to show convicts the logical "inexpedience" of crime, not their estrangement from religion. For these rationalists, society was the source of and the solution to crime.

Ultimately, hard labor became the preferred rationalist therapy.Hirsch, 23. Bentham eventually adopted this approach, and his well-known 1791 design for the Panopticon prison called for inmates to labor in solitary cells for the course of their imprisonment. Another rationalist, William Eden, collaborated with John Howard and Justice William Blackstone in drafting the Penitentiary Act of 1779, which called for a penal regime of hard labor.

According to social and legal historian Adam J. Hirsch, the rationalists had only a secondary impact on United States penal practices. But their ideas—whether consciously adopted by United States prison reformers or not—resonate in various United States penal initiatives to the present day.

Historical development of United States prison systems

Although convicts played a significant role in British settlement of North America, according to legal historian Adam J. Hirsch " e wholesale incarceration of criminals is in truth a comparatively recent episode in the history of Anglo-American jurisprudence." Imprisonment facilities were present from the earliest English settlement of North America, but the fundamental purpose of these facilities changed in the early years of United States legal history as a result of a geographically widespread "penitentiary" movement. The form and function of prison systems in the United States has continued to change as a result of political and scientific developments, as well as notable reform movements during the Jacksonian Era, Reconstruction Era, Progressive Era, and the 1970s. But the status of penal incarceration as the primary mechanism for criminal punishment has remained the same since its first emergence in the wake of the American Revolution.

Early settlement, convict transportation, and the prisoner trade

Prisoners and prisons appeared in North America simultaneous to the arrival of European settlers. Among the ninety or so men who sailed with the explorer known as Christopher Columbus were a young black man abducted from the Canary Islands and at least four convicts. By 1570, Spanish soldiers in St. Augustine, Florida, had built the first substantial prison in North America.Christianson, 6. As other European nations began to compete with Spain for land and wealth in the New World, they too turned to convicts to fill out the crews on their ships.

According to social historian Marie Gottschalk, convicts were "indispensable" to English settlement efforts in what is now the United States. In the late sixteenth century, Richard Hakluyt called for the large-scale conscription of criminals to settle the New World for England. But official action on Haklyut's proposal lagged until 1606, when the English crown escalated its colonization efforts.

Sir John Popham's colonial venture in present-day Maine was stocked, a contemporary critic complained, "out of all the gaols ailsof England."Christianson, 7. The Virginia Company, the corporate entity responsible for settling Jamestown, authorized its colonists to seize Native American children wherever they could "for conversion ... to the knowledge and worship of the true God and their redeemer, Christ Jesus." The colonists themselves lived, in effect, as prisoners of the Company's governor and his agents. Men caught trying to escape were tortured to death; seamstresses who erred in their sewing were subject to whipping. One Richard Barnes, accused of uttering "base and detracting words" against the governor, was ordered to be "disarmed and have his arms broken and his tongue bored through with an awl" before being banished from the settlement entirely.

When control of the Virginia Company passed to Sir Edwin Sandys in 1618, efforts to bring large numbers of settlers to the New World against their will gained traction alongside less coercive measures like indentured servitude.Christianson, 9. Vagrancy statutes began to provide for penal transportation to the American colonies as an alternative to capital punishment in this period, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. At the same time, the legal definition of "vagrancy" was greatly expanded.

Soon, a royal commissions endorsed the notion that any felon—except those convicted of murder, witchcraft, burglary, or rape—could legally be transported to Virginia or the West Indies to work as a plantation servant. Sandys also proposed sending maids to Jamestown as "breeders," whose costs of passage could be paid for by the planters who took them on as "wives."Christianson, 11. Soon, over sixty such women had made the passage to Virginia, and more followed. King James I's royal administration also sent "vagrant" children to the New World as servants. a letter in the Virginia Company's records suggests that as many as 1,500 children were sent to Virginia between 1619 and 1627. By 1619, African prisoners were brought to Jamestown and sold as slaves as well, marking England's entry into the Atlantic slave trade.Christianson, 13.

The infusion of kidnapped children, maids, convicts, and Africans to Virginia during the early part of the seventeenth century inaugurated a pattern that would continue for nearly two centuries. By 1650, the majority of British emigrants to colonial North America went as "prisoners" of one sort or another—whether as indentured servants, convict laborers, or slaves.Christianson, 15.

The prisoner trade became the "moving force" of English colonial policy after the Restoration—i.e., from the summer of 1660 onward—according to By 1680, the Reverend Morgan Godwyn estimated that almost 10,000 persons were spirited away to the Americas annually by the English crown.

Parliament accelerated the prisoner trade in the eighteenth century. Under England's Bloody Code, a large portion of the realm's convicted criminal population faced the death penalty. But pardons were common. During the eighteenth century, the majority of those sentenced to die in English courts were pardoned—often in exchange for voluntary transport to the colonies. In 1717, Parliament empowered the English courts to directly sentence offenders to transportation, and by 1769 transportation was the leading punishment for serious crime in Great Britain. Over two-thirds of those sentenced during sessions of the Old Bailey in 1769 were transported.Christianson, 24. The list of "serious crimes" warranting transportation continued to expand throughout the eighteenth century, as it had during the seventeenth. Historian A. Roger Ekirch estimates that as many as one-quarter of all British emigrants to colonial America during the 1700s were convicts. In the 1720s, James Oglethorpe settled the colony of Georgia almost entirely with convict settlers.

The typical transported convict during the 1700s was brought to the North American colonies on board a "prison ship."Christianson, 33. Upon arrival, the convict's keepers would bathe and clothe him or her (and, in extreme cases, provide a fresh wig) in preparation for a convict auction. Newspapers advertised the arrival of a convict cargo in advance, and buyers would come at an appointed hour to purchase convicts off the auction block.

Prisons played an essential role in the convict trade. Some ancient prisons, like the Fleet and Newgate, still remained in use during the high period of the American prisoner trade in the eighteenth century. But more typically an old house, medieval dungeon space, or private structure would act as a holding pen for those bound for American plantations or the Royal Navy (under impressment).Christianson, 18. Operating clandestine prisons in major port cities for detainees whose transportation to the New World was not strictly legal, became a lucrative trade on both sides of the Atlantic in this period. Unlike contemporary prisons, those associated with the convict trade served a custodial, not a punitive function.

Many colonists in British North America resented convict transportation. As early as 1683, Pennsylvania's colonial legislature attempted to bar felons from being introduced within its borders. Benjamin Franklin called convict transportation "an insult and contempt, the cruellest, that ever one people offered to another." Franklin suggested that the colonies send some of North America's rattlesnakes to England, to be set loose in its finest parks, in revenge. But transportation of convicts to England's North American colonies continued until the American Revolution, and many officials in England saw it as a humane necessity in light of the harshness of the penal code and contemporary conditions in English jails.Christianson, 51. Dr. Samuel Johnson, upon hearing that British authorities might bow to continuing agitation in the American colonies against transportation, reportedly told James Boswell: "Why they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging!"

When the American Revolution ended the prisoner trade to North America, the abrupt halt threw Britain's penal system into disarray, as prisons and jails quickly filled with the many convicts who previously would have moved on to the colonies.Christianson, 75; ''see also'' Meranze, 141; Hirsch, 19. Conditions steadily worsened. It was during this crisis period in the English criminal justice system that penal reformer John Howard began his work. Howard's comprehensive study of British penal practice, ''The State of the Prisons in England and Wales'', was first published in 1777—one year after the start of the Revolution.

Colonial criminal punishments, jails, and workhouses

The jail was built in 1690 by order of Plimouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony Courts. Used as a jail from 1690–1820; at one time moved and attached to the Constable's home. The 'Old Gaol' was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

Although jails were an early fixture of colonial North American communities, they generally did not serve as places of incarceration as a form of criminal punishment. Instead, the main role of the colonial American jail was as a non-punitive detention facility for pre-trial and pre-sentence criminal defendants, as well as imprisoned debtors. The most common penal sanctions of the day were fines, whipping, and community-oriented punishments like the stocks.

Jails were among the earliest public structures built in colonial British North America. The 1629 colonial charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, granted the shareholders behind the venture the right to establish laws for their settlement "not contrarie to the lawes of our realm in England" and to administer "lawfull correction" to violators, and Massachusetts established a house of correction for punishing criminals by 1635. Colonial Pennsylvania built two houses of correction starting in 1682, and Connecticut established one in 1727. By the eighteenth century, every county in the North American colonies had a jail.

Colonial American jails were not the "ordinary mechanism of correction" for criminal offenders, according to social historian David Rothman. Criminal incarceration as a penal sanction was "plainly a second choice," either a supplement to or a substitute for traditional criminal punishments of the day, in the words of historian Adam J. Hirsch.Hirsch, 8. Eighteenth-century criminal codes provided for a far wider range of criminal punishments than contemporary state and federal criminal laws in the United States. Fines, whippings, the stocks, the pillory, the public cage, banishment, capital punishment at the gallows, penal servitude in private homes—all of these punishments came before imprisonment in British colonial America.

The most common sentence of the colonial era was a fine or a whipping, but the stocks were another common punishment—so much so that most colonies, like Virginia in 1662, hastened to build these before either the courthouse or the jail. The theocratic communities of Puritan Massachusetts imposed faith-based punishments like the admonition—a formal censure, apology, and pronouncement of criminal sentence (generally reduced or suspended), performed in front of the church-going community. Sentences to the colonial American workhouse—when they were actually imposed on defendants—rarely exceeded three months, and sometimes spanned just a single day.

Colonial jails served a variety of public functions other than penal imprisonment. Civil imprisonment for debt was one of these,Hirsch, 7. but colonial jails also served as warehouses for prisoners-of-war and political prisoners (especially during the American Revolution). They were also an integral part of the transportation and slavery systems—not only as warehouses for convicts and slaves being put up for auction, but also as a means of disciplining both kinds of servants.

The colonial jail's primary criminal law function was as a pre-trial and pre-sentence detention facility. Generally, only the poorest or most despised defendants found their way into the jails of colonial North America, since colonial judges rarely denied requests for bail. The only penal function of significance that colonial jails served was for contempt—but this was a coercive technique designed to protect the power of the courts, not a penal sanction in its own right.

The colonial jail differed from today's United States prisons not only in its purpose, but in its structure. Many were no more than a cage or closet. Colonial jailers ran their institutions on a "familial" model and resided in an apartment attached to the jail, sometimes with a family of their own. The colonial jail's design resembled an ordinary domestic residence, and inmates essentially rented their bed and paid the jailer for necessities.

Before the close of the American Revolution, few statutes or regulations defined the colonial jailers' duty of care or other responsibilities. Upkeep was often haphazard, and escapes quite common. Few official efforts were made to maintain inmates' health or see to their other basic needs.

Post-Revolutionary penal reform and the beginnings of United States prison systems

The first major prison reform movement in the United States came after the American Revolution, at the start of the nineteenth century. According to historians Adam J. Hirsch and David Rothman, the reform of this period was shaped less by intellectual movements in England than by a general clamor for action in a time of population growth and increasing social mobility, which prompted a critical reappraisal and revision of penal corrective techniques.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 57; Hirsch, 32, 114. To address these changes, post-colonial legislators and reformers began to stress the need for a system of hard labor to replace ineffectual corporal and traditional punishments. Ultimately, these early efforts yielded the United States' first penitentiary systems.

The onset of the eighteenth century brought major demographic and social change to colonial and, eventually post-colonial American life.Hirsch, 39. The century was marked by rapid population growth throughout the colonies—a result of lower mortality rates and increasing (though small at first) rates of immigration. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, this trend persisted. Between 1790 and 1830, the population of the newly independent North American states greatly increased, and the number and density of urban centers did as well.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 58. The population of Massachusetts almost doubled in this period, while it tripled in Pennsylvania and increased five-fold in New York. In 1790, no American city had more than fifty thousand residents; however, by 1830 nearly 500,000 people lived in cities larger than that.

The population of the former British colonies also became increasingly mobile during the eighteenth century, especially after the Revolution. Movement to urban centers, in and out of emerging territories, and up and down a more fluid social ladder throughout the century made it difficult for the localism and hierarchy that had structured American life in the seventeenth century to retain their former significance. The Revolution only accelerated patterns of dislocation and transience, leaving displaced families and former soldiers struggling to adapt to the strictures of a stunted post-war economy. The emergence of cities created a kind of community very different from the pre-revolutionary model. The crowded streets of emerging urban centers like Philadelphia seemed to contemporary observers to dangerously blur class, sex, and racial boundaries.

Demographic change in the eighteenth century coincided with shifts in the configuration of crime.Hirsch, 36. After 1700, literary evidence from a variety of sources—''e.g.'', ministers, newspapers, and judges—suggest that property crime rates rose (or, at least, were perceived to). Conviction rates appear to have risen during the last half of the eighteenth century, rapidly so in the 1770s and afterward and especially in urban areas. Contemporary accounts also suggest widespread transiency among former criminals.

Communities began to think about their town as something less than the sum of all its inhabitants during this period, and the notion of a distinct criminal class began to materialize. In the Philadelphia of the 1780s, for example, city authorities worried about the proliferation of taverns on the outskirts of the city, "sites of an alternative, interracial, lower-class culture" that was, in the words of one observer, "the very root of vice." In Boston, a higher urban crime rate led to the creation of a specialized, urban court in 1800.

The efficacy of traditional, community-based punishments waned during the eighteenth century. Penal servitude, a mainstay of British and colonial American criminal justice, became nearly extinct during the seventeenth century, at the same time that Northern states, beginning with Vermont in 1777, began to abolish slavery. Fines and bonds for good behavior—one of the most common criminal sentences of the colonial era—were nearly impossible to enforce among the transient poor. As the former American colonists expanded their political loyalty beyond the parochial to their new state governments, promoting a broader sense of the public welfare, banishment (or " warning out") also seemed inappropriate, since it merely passed criminals onto a neighboring community. Public shaming punishments like the pillory had always been inherently unstable methods of enforcing the public order, since they depended in large part on the participation of the accused and the public. As the eighteenth century matured, and a social distance between the criminal and the community became more manifest, mutual antipathy (rather than community compassion and offender penitence) became more common at public executions and other punishments. In urban centers like Philadelphia, growing class and racial tensions—especially in the wake of the Revolution—led crowds to actively sympathize with the accused at executions and other public punishments.

Colonial governments began making efforts to reform their penal architecture and excise many traditional punishments even before the Revolution. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut all inaugurated efforts to reconstitute their penal systems in the years leading up to the war to make incarceration at hard labor the sole punishment for most crimes. Although war interrupted these efforts, they were renewed afterward. A "climate change" in post-Revolutionary politics, in the words of historian Adam J. Hirsch, made colonial legislatures open to legal change of all sorts after the Revolution, as they retooled their constitutions and criminal codes to reflect their separation from England. The Anglophobic politics of the day bolstered efforts to do away with punishments inherited from English legal practice.

Reformers in the United States also began to discuss the effect of criminal punishment itself on criminality in the post-revolutionary period, and at least some concluded that the barbarism of colonial-era punishments, inherited from English penal practice, did more harm than good. "The mild voice of reason and humanity," wrote New York penal reformer Thomas Eddy in 1801, "reached not the thrones of princes or the halls of legislators."Qtd. in Rothman, ''Discovery'', 58 "The mother country had stifled the colonists' benevolent instincts," according to Eddy, "compelling them to emulate the crude customs of the old world. The result was the predominance of archaic and punitive laws that only served to perpetuate crime." Attorney William Bradford made an argument similar to Eddy's in a 1793 treatise.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century every state except North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida had amended its criminal code to provide for incarceration (primarily at hard labor) as the primary punishment for all but the most serious offenses.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 61. Provincial laws in Massachusetts began to prescribe short terms in the workhouse for deterrence throughout the eighteenth century and, by mid-century, the first statutes mandating long-term hard labor in the workhouse as a penal sanction appeared. In New York, a 1785 bill, restricted in effect to New York City, authorized municipal officials to substitute up to six months' hard labor in the workhouse in all cases where prior law had mandated corporal punishment.Hirsch, 42. In 1796, an additional bill expanded this program to the entire state of New York. Pennsylvania established a hard labor law in 1786. Hard-labor programs expanded to New Jersey in 1797, to Virginia in 1796, to Kentucky in 1798, and to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maryland in 1800.

This move toward imprisonment did not translate to an immediate break from traditional forms of punishment. Many new criminal provisions merely expanded the discretion of judges to choose from among various punishments, including imprisonment. The 1785 amendments to Massachusetts' arson statute, for instance, expanded the available punishments for setting fire to a non-dwelling from whipping to hard labor, imprisonment in jail, the pillory, whipping, fining, or any or all of those punishments in combination. Massachusetts judges wielded this new-found discretion in various ways for twenty years, before fines, incarceration, or the death penalty became the sole available sanctions under the state's penal code. Other states—''e.g.'', New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut—also lagged in their shift toward incarceration.Hirsch, 59.

Prison construction kept pace with post-revolutionary legal change. All states that revised their criminal codes to provide for incarceration also constructed new state prisons. But the focus of penal reformers in the post-revolutionary years remained largely external to the institutions they built, according to David Rothman.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 62. For reformers of the day, Rothman claims, the fact of imprisonment—not the institution's internal routine and its effect on the offender—was of primary concern. Incarceration seemed more humane than traditional punishments like hanging and whipping, and it theoretically matched punishment more specifically to the crime. But it would take another period of reform, in the Jacksonian Era, for state prison initiatives to take the shape of actual justice institutions.

Jacksonian and Antebellum era

By 1800, eleven of the then-sixteen United States—''i.e.'', Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Vermont, Maryland, New Hampshire, Georgia, and Virginia—had in place some form of penal incarceration. But the primary focus of contemporary criminology remained on the legal system, according to historian David Rothman, not the institutions in which convicts served their sentences. This changed during the Jacksonian Era, as contemporary notions of criminality continued to shift.

Starting in the 1820s, a new institution, the "penitentiary", gradually became the focal point of criminal justice in the United States.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 79. At the same time, other novel institutions—the asylum and the almshouse—redefined care for the mentally ill and the poor. For its proponents, the penitentiary was an ambitious program whose external appearance, internal arrangements, and daily routine would counteract the disorder and immorality thought to be breeding crime in American society. Although its adoption was haphazard at first, and marked by political strife—especially in the South—the penitentiary became an established institution in the United States by the end of the 1830s.

New origins of deviancy and an institutional response

Jacksonian-era reformers and prison officials began seeking the origins of crime in the personal histories of criminals and traced the roots of crime to society itself. In the words of historian David Rothman, "They were certain that children lacking discipline quickly fell victim to the influence of vice at loose in the community." Jacksonian reformers specifically tied rapid population growth and social mobility to the disorder and immorality of contemporary society. Alongside the movement for reform was for prisons to justify the safety to the public.

To combat society's decay and the risks presented by it, Jacksonian penologists designed an institutional setting to remove "deviants" from the corruption of their families and communities.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 71 In this corruption-free environment, the deviant could learn the vital moral lessons he or she had previously ignored while sheltered from the temptations of vice. This solution ultimately took the shape of the penitentiary.

In the 1820s, New York and Pennsylvania began new prison initiatives that inspired similar efforts in a number of other states. Post-revolutionary carceral regimes had conformed to the English workhouse tradition; inmates labored together by day and shared congregate quarters at night.

Beginning in 1790, Pennsylvania became the first of the United States to institute solitary confinement for incarcerated convicts. After 1790, those sentenced to hard labor in Pennsylvania were moved indoors to an inner block of solitary cells in Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail. New York began implementing solitary living quarters at New York City's Newgate Prison in 1796.

From the efforts at the Walnut Street Jail and Newgate Prison, two competing systems of imprisonment emerged in the United States by the 1820s. The "Auburn" (or "Congregate System") emerged from New York's prison of the same name between 1819 and 1823.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 79; Hirsch, 65. And the "Pennsylvania" (or "Separate System") emerged in that state between 1826 and 1829. The only material difference between the two systems was whether inmates would ever leave their solitary cells—under the Pennsylvania System, inmates almost never did, but under the Auburn System most inmates labored in congregate workshops by day and slept alone.

To advocates of both systems, the promise of institutionalization depended upon isolating the prisoner from the moral contamination of society and establishing discipline in him (or, in rarer cases, her). But the debate as to which system was superior continued into the mid-nineteenth century, pitting some of the period's most prominent reformers against one another.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 81. Samuel Gridley Howe promoted the Pennsylvania System in opposition to Mathew Carey, an Auburn proponent; Dorothea Dix took up the Pennsylvania System against Louis Dwight; and Francis Lieber supported Pennsylvania against Francis Wayland. The Auburn system eventually prevailed, however, due largely to its lesser cost.

The Pennsylvania system

The Pennsylvania system, first implemented in the early 1830s at that state's Eastern State Penitentiary outskirts of Philadelphia and Western State Penitentiary at Pittsburgh, was designed to maintain the complete separation of inmates at all times. Until 1904, prisoners entered the institution with a black hood over their head, so they would never know who their fellow convicts were, before being led to the cell where they would serve the remainder of their sentence in near-constant solitude.Christianson, 133. The Cherry Hill complex entailed a massive expenditure of state funds; its walls alone cost $200,000, and its final price tag reached $750,000, one of the largest state expenditures of its day.

Like its competitor Auburn system, Eastern State's regimen was premised on the inmate's potential for individual rehabilitation.Christianson, 134. Solitude, not labor, was its hallmark; labor was reserved only for those inmates who affirmatively earned the privilege. All contact with the outside world more or less ceased for Eastern State prisoners. Proponents boasted that a Pennsylvania inmate was "perfectly secluded from the world ... hopelessly separated from ... family, and from all communication with and knowledge of them for the whole term of imprisonment."

Through isolation and silence—complete separation from the moral contaminants of the outside worlds—Pennsylvania supporters surmised that inmates would begin a reformation. "Each individual," a representative tract reads, "will necessarily be made the instrument of his own punishment; his conscience will be the avenger of society."

Proponents insisted that the Pennsylvania system would involve only mild disciplinary measures, reasoning that isolated men would have neither the resources nor the occasion to violate rules or to escape.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 86. But from the outset Eastern State's keepers used corporal punishments to enforce order.Christianson, 136. Officials used the "iron gag," a bridle-like metal bit placed in the inmate's mouth and chained around his neck and head; the "shower bath," repeated dumping of cold water onto a restrained convict; or the "mad chair," into which inmates were strapped in such a way so as to prevent their bodies from resting.

Ultimately, only three prisons ever enacted the costly Pennsylvania program. But nearly all penal reformers of the antebellum period believed in Pennsylvania's use of solitary confinement. The system remained largely intact at Eastern State Penitentiary into the early twentieth century.

New York, the Auburn system, and the future of the penitentiary

The Auburn or "Congregate" System became the archetypical model penitentiary in the 1830s and 1840s, as its use expanded from New York's Auburn Penitentiary into the Northeast, the Midwest, and the South. The Auburn system's combination of congregate labor in prison workshops and solitary confinement by night became a near-universal ideal in United States prison systems, if not an actual reality.

Under the Auburn system, prisoners slept alone at night and labored together in a congregate workshop during the day for the entirety of their fixed criminal sentence as set by a judge.Rothman, ''Discovery'', 82. Prisoners at Auburn were not to converse at any time, or even to exchange glances. Guards patrolled secret passageways behind the walls of the prison's workshops in moccasins, so inmates could never be sure whether or not they were under surveillance.

One official described Auburn's discipline as "tak ngmeasures for convincing the felon that he is no longer his own master; no longer in a condition to practice deceptions in idleness; that he must learn and practice diligently some useful trade, whereby, when he is let out of the prison to obtain an honest living." Inmates were permitted no intelligence of events on the outside. In the words of an early warden, Auburn inmates were "to be literally buried from the world."Rothman, ''Discovery'', 95. The institution's regime remained largely intact until after the Civil War.

Auburn was the second state prison built in New York State. The first, Newgate, located in present-day Greenwich Village in New York City, contained no solitary cells beyond a few set aside for "worst offenders." Its first keeper, Quaker Thomas Eddy, believed rehabilitation of the criminal was the primary end of punishment (though Eddy also believed that his charges were "wicked and depraved, capable of every atrocity, and ever plotting some means of violence and escape.") Eddy was not inclined to rely on prisoners' fear of his severity; his "chief disciplinary weapon" was solitary confinement on limited rations, he forbade his guards from striking inmates, and permitted "well-behaved" inmates to have a supervised visit with family once every three months.W. David Lewis, 32. Eddy made largely unsuccessful efforts to establish profitable prison labor programs, which he had hoped would cover incarceration costs and provide seed money for inmates' re-entry into society in the form of the "overstint"—i.e., a small portion of the profits of an inmate's labor while incarcerated, payable at his or her release. Discipline nevertheless remained hard to enforce, and major riots occurred in 1799 and 1800—the latter only subdued via military intervention. Conditions continued to worsen in the wake of the riots, especially during a crime wave that followed the War of 1812.

New York legislators set aside funds for construction of the Auburn prison to address the disappointments of Newgate and alleviate its persistent overcrowding. Almost from the outset, Auburn officials, with the consent of the legislature, eschewed the "humane" style envisioned by Thomas Eddy for Newgate. Floggings of up to thirty-nine lashes in duration as punishment for disciplinary infractions were permitted under an 1819 state law, which also authorized the use of the stocks and the irons. The practice of providing convicts with some of the proceeds of their labor at the time of release, the "overstint," was discontinued. The severity of the new regime likely caused another series of riots in 1820, after which the legislature formed a New York State Prison Guard for putting down future disturbances.Christianson, 113.

Officials also began implementing a classification system at Auburn in the wake of the riots, dividing inmates into three groups: (1) the worst, who were placed on constant solitary lockdown; (2) middling offenders, who were kept in solitary and worked in groups when well-behaved; and (3) the "least guilty and depraved," who were permitted to sleep in solitary and work in groups. Construction on a new solitary cell block for category (1) inmates ended in December 1821, after which these "hardened" offenders moved into their new home. Within a little over a year, however, five of these men had died of consumption, another forty-one were seriously ill, and several had gone insane.Christianson, 114. After visiting the prison and seeing the residents of the new cell block, Governor Joseph C. Yates was so appalled by their condition that he pardoned several of them outright.

Scandal struck Auburn again when a female inmate became pregnant in solitary confinement and, later, died after repeated beatings and the onset of pneumonia. (Because Auburn relied on female inmates for its washing and cleaning services, women remained part of the population but the first separate women's institution in New York was not completed until 1893.) A jury convicted the keeper who beat the woman of assault and battery, and fined him $25, but he remained on the job.Christianson, 119. A grand jury investigation into other aspects of the prison's management followed but was hampered, among other obstacles, by the fact that convicts could not present evidence in court. Even so, the grand jury eventually concluded that Auburn's keepers had been permitted to flog inmates without a higher official present, a violation of state law. But neither the warden nor any other officer was ever prosecuted, and the use and intensity of flogging only increased at Auburn, as well as the newer Sing Sing prison, in subsequent years.

Despite its early scandals and regular political power struggles that left it with an unstable administrative structure, Auburn remained a model institution nationwide for decades to come. Massachusetts opened a new prison in 1826 modeled on the Auburn system, and within the first decade of Auburn's existence, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia all constructed prisons patterned on its congregate system. By the eve of the American Civil War, Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas, with varying success, had all inaugurated efforts to establish an Auburn-model prison in their jurisdictions.

The widespread move to penitentiaries in the antebellum United States changed the geography of criminal punishment, as well as its central therapy. Offenders were now ferried across water or into walled compounds to centralized institutions of the criminal justice system hidden from public view. The penitentiary thus largely ended community involvement in the penal process—beyond a limited role in the criminal trial itself—though many prisons permitted visitors who paid a fee to view the inmates throughout the nineteenth century.

The South

On eve of American Civil War, crime did not pose a major concern in the Southern United States. Southerners in the main considered crime to be a Northern problem. A traditional extra-legal system of remedying slights, based in honor culture made personal violence the hallmark of Southern crime. Southern penitentiary systems brought only the most hardened criminals under centralized state control. Most criminals remained outside of formal state control structures—especially outside of Southern cities.

=Antebellum Southern republicanism and political opposition to penitentiary building

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The historical record suggests that, in contrast to Northerners, Southern states experienced a unique political anxiety about whether to construct prisons during the antebellum period. Disagreements over republican principles—''i.e.'', the role of the state in social governance—became the focus of a persistent debate about the necessity of southern penitentiaries in the decades between independence and the Civil War.Ayers, 42.

To many Southerners, writes historian Edward L. Ayers, "republicanism" translated simply to freedom from the will of anyone else: Centralized power, even in the name of an activist republican government, promised more evil than good.Ayers, 141. Ayers concludes that this form of Southern republicanism owed its particular shape to slavery. The South's slave economy perpetuated a rural, localized culture, he argues, in which men distrusted strangers' claims to power. In this political milieu, the notion of surrendering individual liberties of any kind—even those of criminals—for some abstract conception of "social improvement" was abhorrent to many.

But criminal incarceration appealed to others in the South. These Southerners believed that freedom would best grow under the protection of an enlightened state government that made the criminal law more effective by eradicating its more brutal practices and offering criminals the possibility of rehabilitation and restoration to society. Some also believed that penitentiaries would help to remove the contagion of depravity from republican society by segregating those who threatened the republican ideal (the "disturbing class").Ayers, 45. Notions of living up to the world's ideas of "progress" also animated Southern penal reformers. When the Georgia legislature considered abolishing the state's penitentiary after a devastating fire in 1829, reformers there worried their state would become the first to renounce republican "progress."Ayers, 47.

A sizable portion of the Southern population—if not the majority—did not support the establishment of the penitentiary. Of the two times that voters in the region had an opportunity to express their opinion of the penitentiary system at the ballot box—in Alabama and North Carolina—the penitentiary lost overwhelmingly. Some viewed traditional public punishments as the most republican mechanism for criminal justice, due to their inherent transparency. Some worried that, since the quantity of suffering under penitentiary system would sure to far exceed that of the traditional system, Southern jurors would maintain their historic disposal toward acquittal. Evangelical Southern clergymen also opposed the penitentiary—especially when its implementation accompanied statutory restriction of the death penalty, which they deemed a biblical requirement for certain crimes.Ayers, 56.

Opposition to the penitentiary crossed party lines; neither the Whigs nor the Democrats lent consistent support to the institution in the antebellum period. But consistent and enthusiastic support for the penitentiary did come, almost uniformly, from Southern governors.Ayers, 52–53. The motives of these governors are note entirely unclear, historian Edward L. Ayers concludes: Perhaps they hoped that the additional patronage positions offered by a penitentiary would augment the historically weak power of the Southern executive; perhaps they were legitimately concerned with the problem of crime; or perhaps both considerations played a role. Grand juries—drawn from Southern "elites"—also issued regular calls for penitentiaries in this period.

Ultimately, the penitentiary's supporters prevailed in the South, as in the North. Southern legislators enacted prison legislation in state after Southern state before the Civil War, often over public opposition. Their motives in doing so appear mixed. According to Edward L. Ayers, some Southern legislators appear to have believed they knew what was best for their people in any case.Ayers, 53–55. Since many Southern legislators came from the elite classes, Ayers also observes, they may also have had a personal "class control" motive for enacting penitentiary legislation, even while they could point to their participation in penitentiary efforts as evidence of their own benevolence. Historian Michael S. Hindus concludes that Southern hesitation about the penitentiary, at least in South Carolina, stemmed from the slave system, which made the creation of a white criminal underclass undesirable.

=Prison construction

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Southern states erected penitentiaries alongside their Northern counterparts in the early nineteenth century.Ayers, 34. Virginia (1796), Maryland (1829), Tennessee (1831), Georgia (1832), Louisiana and Missouri (1834–1837), and Mississippi and Alabama (1837–1842) all erected penitentiary facilities during the antebellum period. Only the North Carolina, South Carolina and largely uninhabited Florida failed to build any penitentiary before the Civil WarAyers, 35.

Virginia was the first state after Pennsylvania, in 1796, to dramatically reduce the number of crimes punishable by death, and its legislators simultaneously called for the construction of a "gaol and penitentiary house" as the cornerstone of a new criminal justice regime.Ayers, 38. Designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the state's first prison at Richmond resembled Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon design (as well as the not-yet-built Eastern State Penitentiary's). All inmates served a mandatory period of solitary confinement after initial entry.

Unfortunately for its inhabitants, the site at Richmond where Virginia's first penitentiary was built bordered a stagnant pool, in which sewage collected. The prison's cells had no heating system and water oozed from its walls, leading inmates' extremities to freeze during the winter months. Prisoners could perform no work during the solitary portion of their sentence, which they served completely isolated in near-total darkness, and many went mad during this portion of their sentence. Those prisoners who survived the isolation period joined other inmates in the prison workshop to make goods for the state militia. The workshop never turned a profit. Escapes were common.

But despite Virginia's example, Kentucky, Maryland, and Georgia all constructed prisons before 1820, and the trend continued in the South thereafter. Early Southern prisons were marked by escapes, violence, and arson.Ayers, 59. The personal reformation of inmates was left almost solely to underpaid prison chaplains. Bitter opposition from the public and rampant overcrowding both marked Southern penal systems during the antebellum period. But once established, southern penitentiaries took on lives of their own, with each state's system experiencing a complex history of innovation and stagnation, efficient and inefficient wardens, relative prosperity and poverty, fires, escapes, and legislative attacks; but they did follow a common trajectory.

During the period in which slavery existed, few black Southerners in the lower South were imprisoned, and virtually none of those imprisoned were slaves.Ayers, 61. Most often, slaves accused of crimes—especially less serious offenses—were tried informally in extra-legal plantation "courts," although it was not uncommon for slaves to come within the formal jurisdiction of the Southern courts. The majority of Southern inmates during the antebellum period were foreign-born whites. Nevertheless, in the upper South, free blacks made up a significant (and disproportionate) one-third of state prison populations.Ayers, 62–63. Governors and legislators in both the upper and lower South became concerned about racial mixing in their prison systems. Virginia experimented for a time with selling free blacks convicted of "serious" crimes into slavery until public opposition led to the measure's repeal (but only after forty such persons were sold).

Very few women, black or white, were imprisoned in the antebellum South.Ayers, 63. But for those women who did come under the control of Southern prisons, conditions were often "horrendous," according to Edward L. Ayers. Although they were not made to shave their heads like male convicts, female inmates in the antebellum South did not live in specialized facilities—as was the case in many antebellum Northern prisons—and sexual abuse was common.

As in the North, the costs of imprisonment preoccupied Southern authorities, although it appears that Southerners devoted more concern to this problem than their Northern counterparts.Ayers, 64. Southern governors of the antebellum period tended to have little patience for prisons that did not turn a profit or, at least, break even. Southern prisons adopted many of the same money-making tactics as their Northern counterparts. Prisons earned money by charging fees to visitors.Ayers, 65. They also earned money by harnessing convict labor to produce simple goods that were in steady demand, like slave shoes, wagons, pails, and bricks. But this fomented unrest among workers and tradesmen in Southern towns and cities. Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a former tailor, waged political war on his state's penitentiary and the industries it had introduced among its inmates.Ayers, 66. To avoid these conflicts, some states—like Georgia and Mississippi—experimented with prison industry for state-run enterprises. But in the end few penitentiaries, North or South, turned a profit during the antebellum period.

Presaging Reconstruction-era developments, however, Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee began considering the idea of leasing their convicts to private businesspersons by the 1850s. Prisoners in Missouri, Alabama, Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana all leased their convicts during the antebellum period under a variety of arrangements—some inside the prison itself (as Northern prisons were also doing), and others outside of the state's own facilities.

=Urban crime in the antebellum South

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Between 1800 and 1860, the vast majority of the Southern population worked in agriculture.McPherson, 40. Whereas the proportion of the Northern population working on farms dropped in this period from 70 to 40 percent, 80 percent of Southerners were consistently engaged in farm-related work. Reflecting this, only one-tenth of Southerners lived in what the contemporary census criteria described as an urban area (compared to nearly one-quarter of Northerners).

Antebellum southern cities stood at juncture of the region's slave economy and the international market economy, and economics appear to have played a crucial role in shaping the face of crime in Southern cities. These urban centers tended to attract young and propertyless white males, not only from the Southern countryside, but also from the North and abroad. Urban immigration in the South reached a peak during the 1850s, when an economic boom in cotton produced "flush times." Poor young men and others—white and black—settled on the peripheries of Southern cities like Savannah, Georgia. Here they came into contact with the wealthy and more stable elements of modern society,Ayers, 82–83. producing demographics similar to those in post-revolutionary Philadelphia and other Northern cities.

The first modern Southern police forces emerged between 1845 and the Civil War in large part due to the class-based tensions that developed in Southern cities. Some Southern cities—notably New Orleans and Charleston—experimented with police forces even earlier in the eighteenth century as a means of controlling their large urban slave populations.Ayers, 83. But most Southern cities relied on volunteer night-watch forces prior to mid-century. The transition to uniformed police forces was not especially smooth: Major political opposition arose as a result of the perceived corruption, inefficiency, and threat to individual liberty posed by the new police.

According to Edward L. Ayers, Southern police forces of the antebellum period tended to enforce uniformity by creating crime out of "disorder" and "nuisance" enforcement.Ayers, 90. The vast majority of theft prosecutions in the antebellum South arose in its cities. And property offenders made up a disproportionate share of the convict population. Although thieves and burglars constituted fewer than 20 percent of the criminals convicted in Southern courts, they made up about half the South's prison population.Ayers, 75.

During the period between independence and the Civil War, Southern inmates were disproportionately ethnic. Foreign-born persons made up less than 3 percent of the South's free population. In fact, only one-eighth of all immigrants to the United States during the antebellum period settled in the South. Yet foreign immigrants represented anywhere from 8 to 37 percent of the prison population of the Southern states during this period.

Crime in Southern cities generally mirrored that of Northern ones during the antebellum years. Both sections experienced a spike in imprisonment rates during a national market depression on the eve of the American Civil War.Ayers, 91. The North had experienced a similar depression during the 1830s and 1840s—with a concurrent increase in imprisonment—that the agrarian South did not. But urban crime in the South differed from that in the North in one key way—its violence. A significantly higher percentage of violence characterized Southern criminal offenders of all class levels. Young white males made up the bulk of violent offenders in the urban South.

Slavery in the urban South also played a role in the development of its penal institutions. Urban slave-owners often utilized jails to "store" their human property and to punish slaves for disciplinary infractions. Slaveholding in urban areas tended to be less rigid than in the rural South. Nearly 60 percent of slaves living in Savannah, Georgia, for example, did not reside with their master; many were allowed to hire themselves out for wages (though they had to share the proceeds with their owner).Ayers, 103. In this environment, where racial control was more difficult to enforce, Southern whites were constantly on guard against black criminality.Ayers, 105. Charleston, South Carolina, established a specialized workhouse for masters to send their slaves for punishment for a fee. In Savannah, Georgia, owners could send their slaves to the city jail to have punishment administered.

=Rural crime in the antebellum South

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Industrialization proceeded haphazardly across the South during the antebellum period, and large sections of the rural population participated in a subsistence economy like that of the colonial era. Patterns of crime in these regions reflected these economic realities; violence, not thefts, took up most of the docket space in rural Southern courts.

Unlike antebellum urban spaces, the ups and downs of the market economy had a lesser impact on crime in the South's rural areas.Ayers, 109. Far fewer theft cases appear on criminal dockets in the rural antebellum South than in its cities (though rural judges and juries, like their urban counterparts, dealt with property offenders more harshly than violent ones). Crime in rural areas consisted almost solely of violent offenses.

Most counties in the antebellum South—as in the North—maintained a jail for housing pre-trial and pre-sentence detainees. These varied in size and quality of construction considerably as a result of disparities in wealth between various counties. Unlike Southern cities, however, rural counties rarely used the jail as criminal punishment in the antebellum period, even as states across the Northeast and the Midwest shifted the focus of their criminal justice process to rehabilitative incarceration. Instead, fines were the mainstay of rural Southern justice.Ayers, 111.

The non-use of imprisonment as a criminal punishment in the rural antebellum South reflected the haphazard administration of criminal justice in these regions. Under the general criminal procedure of the day, victims of theft or violence swore out complaints before their local justice of the peace, who in turn issued arrest warrants for the accused. The county sheriff would execute the warrant and bring the defendant before a magistrate judge, who would conduct a preliminary hearing, after which he could either dismiss the case or bind the accused over to the Superior Court for a grand jury hearing. (Some cases, however, particularly those involving moral offenses like drinking and gambling, were initiated by the grand jury of its own accord.)

Criminal procedure in the antebellum rural South offered many avenues of escape to a criminal defendant, and only the poorest resided in the jail while awaiting trial or sentencing. Those defendants who did spend time in jail before trial had to wait for the prosecutor's biannual visit to their county.Ayers, 112. Southern prosecutors generally did not live in the local area where they prosecuted cases and were generally ill-prepared. Disinterested jurors were also hard to come by, given the generally intimate nature of rural Southern communities.Ayers, 113. Relative leniency in sentencing for appears to have marked most judicial proceedings for violent offenses—the most common. Historical evidence suggests that juries indicted a greater number of potential offenders than the judicial system could handle in the belief that many troublemakers—especially the landless—would leave the country altogether.

Few immigrants or free blacks lived in the rural South in the pre-Civil War years,Ayers, 116. and slaves remained under the dominant control of a separate criminal justice system administered by planters throughout the period. Thus, most criminal defendants were Southern-born whites (and all socio-economic classes were represented on criminal dockets). Blacks occasionally came within the purview of the conventional criminal justice apparatus from their dealings with whites in the "gray market," among other offenses.Ayers, 131. But the danger to whites and blacks alike from illicit trading, the violence that often erupted at their meetings, and the tendency of whites to take advantage of their legally impotent black counterparties all made these occurrences relatively rare.

Reconstruction era

The American Civil War and its aftermath witnessed renewed efforts to reform America's system and rationale for imprisonment.Christianson, 177. Most state prisons remained unchanged since the wave of penitentiary building during the Jacksonian Era and, as a result, were in a state of physical and administrative deterioration. Auburn and Eastern State penitentiaries, the paradigmatic prisons of Jacksonian reform, were little different. New reformers confronted the problems of decaying antebellum prisons with a new penal regime that focused on the rehabilitation of the individual—this time with an emphasis on using institutional inducements as a means of affecting behavioral change. At the same time, Reconstruction-era penology also focused on emerging "scientific" views of criminality related to race and heredity, as the post-war years witnessed the birth of a eugenics movement in the United States.

Northern developments

=Brutality, immigration, eugenics, and "prisons as laboratories"

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Social historian David Rothman describes the story of post-reconstruction prison administration as one of decline from the ambitions Jacksonian period