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The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society)

by Rebecca M. McLennan (Author)
3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 6 ratings
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In the Age of Jackson, private enterprise set up shop in the American penal system. Working hand in glove with state government, contractors in both the North and the South would go on to put more than half a million imprisoned men, women, and youth to hard, sweated toil for private gain by 1900. Held captive, stripped of their rights, and subject to lash and paddle, convict laborers churned out vast quantities of goods and revenue, in some years generating the equivalent of more than $30 billion worth of work. By the 1880s, however, a growing mass of Americans came to regard the prison labor system as immoral and unbefitting of a free republic: it fostered torture and other abuses, degraded free citizen-workers, corrupted government and the legal system, and stifled the supposedly ethical purposes of punishment. The Crisis of Imprisonment tells the remarkable story of this controversial system of penal servitude:―how it came into being, how it worked, how the popular campaigns for its abolition were ultimately victorious, and how it shaped and continues to haunt the American penal system. The author takes the reader into the morally vital world of nineteenth-century artisans, industrial workers, farmers, clergy, convicts, machine politicians, and labor leaders and shows how prisons became a lightning rod in a determined defense of republican and Christian values against the encroachments of an unbridled market capitalism. She explores the vexing ethical questions that prisons posed then and remain exigent today: What are the limits of state power over the minds, bodies, and souls of citizens and others―is torture permissible under certain circumstances? What, if anything, makes the state morally fit to deprive a person of life or liberty? Are prisoners slaves and, if so, by what right? Should prisoners work? Is the prison a morally defensible institution? The eventual abolition of prison labor contracting plunged the prisons into deep fiscal and ideological crisis. The second half of the book offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Progressive Era prison reform as, above all, a response to this crisis. It concludes with an exploration of the long-range impact of both penal servitude and the anti-prison labor movement on the modern American penal system.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0521537835
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0521537834
  3. Publisher
    Cambridge University Press
  4. Publication date
    March 4, 2008
  5. Part of series
    Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6 x 1.18 x 9 inches
  8. Print length
    520 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

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"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

Book Description

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

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press (March 4, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 520 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0521537835
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0521537834
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.55 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.18 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 6 ratings

About the author

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Rebecca M. McLennan

Rebecca M. McLennan

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Rebecca M. McLennan holds the Preston Hotchkis Chair of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on North America, with an emphasis on U.S. legal, political, environmental, and cultural history. She received her PhD from Columbia University and was on the faculty of Harvard University before relocating to the San Francisco-Bay Area. At Berkeley, she teaches courses on American and global foodways; the making of modern consumer culture; the entwined histories of land, law, and property; crime and punishment from colonial times to the present; and environmental history. Her 2008 book, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941, won several major book awards, including the American Historical Association's Littleton-Griswold Prize for best book in U.S. legal history. A second book, Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century (co-authored with David Henkin in 2015 and revised and expanded in 2022), offers a fresh interpretation of the grand narrative of American history, from pre-colonial times through the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

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Top reviews from the United States

  • James
    1.0 out of 5 stars One Star
    Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2018
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  • mar hevka
    5.0 out of 5 stars Serious and Important Book
    Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2015
    Terrific study that becomes more timely and more urgent with each year that passes since its publication. McLennan presents an altogether different and more complicated story, featuring prisoners, guards, administrators, penologists, private contractors, labor unions, and political figures and institutions in New York—the state that stood at the vanguard of national developments in the transformation of both prison life and the politics of punishment. McLennan charts the growth of a powerful and economically significant system of contract prison labor in the nineteenth century, which instituted and relied upon a brutal regime of industrial discipline that fits awkwardly (if at all) into Michel Foucault’s famous account of the modern prison. She also describes, with colorful detail, the fits and starts by which a coalition of forces (Reconstruction-era Republicans, unions, Democratic politicians in the Gilded Age, progressive reformers, former N.Y. Governors holding the reins of national power, and frequently the imprisoned themselves) sought to dismantle that system, often deploring the competition or the example of convict labor, but ultimately calling into question the equation between hard industrial work and just punishment.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Blonde Girl Reads
    5.0 out of 5 stars I would recommend this insightful read
    Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2015
    An extremely well-written, fascinating, and comprehensive history of the American prison system and the way in which social ideas concerning punishment vs rehabilitation have changed over time.I would recommend this insightful read.
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