Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 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, 1818–1865
- 3 Commerce upon the Throne: The Business of Imprisonment in Gilded Age America
- 4 Disciplining the State, Civilizing the Market: The Campaign to Abolish Contract Prison Labor
- 5 A Model Servitude: Prison Reform in the Early Progressive Era
- 6 Uses of the State: The Dialectics of Penal 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, 1915–1917
- 10 Punishment without Labor: Toward the Modern Penal State
- Conclusion: On the Crises of Imprisonment
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2 - Due Convictions: Contractual Penal Servitude and Its Discontents, 1818–1865
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 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, 1818–1865
- 3 Commerce upon the Throne: The Business of Imprisonment in Gilded Age America
- 4 Disciplining the State, Civilizing the Market: The Campaign to Abolish Contract Prison Labor
- 5 A Model Servitude: Prison Reform in the Early Progressive Era
- 6 Uses of the State: The Dialectics of Penal 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, 1915–1917
- 10 Punishment without Labor: Toward the Modern Penal State
- Conclusion: On the Crises of Imprisonment
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
You laggards there on guard! look to your arms!
In at the conquer'd doors they crowd! I am possess'd!
Embody all presences outlaw'd or suffering,
See myself in prison shaped like another man,
And feel the dull unintermitted pain.
For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch,
It is I let out in the morning and barr'd at night.
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass (1855)New York, with its growing and infamously ungovernable convict population, was the first state to confront the escalating crisis of the penitential system of punishment. In the course of the 1820s, New York lawmakers, jurists, and keepers would lay the foundation both of a novel kind of penal institution and a new mode of legal punishment: that of contractual penal servitude. By a process of trial and improvisation, they would gradually weave together four distinctive lines of force – separation and concentration; hard productive labor; harsh corporeal chastisements; and the abridgement of the convicted offender's natural rights, freedoms, and common law liberties – to produce a powerful new mode of legal punishment. After 1830, almost every Northern (and some Southern) states would adopt this system, and it would go on, in the 1860s, to impress its mark upon the Constitution of the United States. Born out of the rolling series of crises that had broken over the penitentiary system in the 1810s, contractual penal servitude was at once a response to the sources of instability within and around the penitential system, a refutation of certain foundational principles of early republican penology, and the means by which the formal, republican, penalty of “confinement to hard labor” would be realized in practice.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Crisis of ImprisonmentProtest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941, pp. 53 - 86Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008