The Crisis of Imprisonment

Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-0-521-53783-4
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 520 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 745 g

Reihe: Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society

America's prison-based system of punishment has not always enjoyed the widespread political and moral legitimacy it has today. In this groundbreaking reinterpretation of penal history, Rebecca McLennan covers the periods of deep instability, popular protest, and political crisis that characterized early American prisons. She details the debates surrounding prison reform, including the limits of state power, the influence of market forces, the role of unfree labor, and the 'just deserts' of wrongdoers. McLennan also explores the system that existed between the War of 1812 and the Civil War, where private companies relied on prisoners for labor. Finally, she discusses the rehabilitation model that has primarily characterized the penal system in the twentieth century. Unearthing fresh evidence from prison and state archives, McLennan shows how, in each of three distinct periods of crisis, widespread dissent culminated in the dismantling of old systems of imprisonment.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McLennan, Rebecca M.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: the grounds of legal punishment; 1. Strains of servitude: legal punishment in the early republic; 2. Due convictions: contractual penal servitude and its discontents; 3. Commerce upon the throne: the business of imprisonment in Gilded Age America; 4. Disciplining the state, civilizing the market: the abolition of contract prison labor; 5. A model servitude: prison reform in the early progressive era; 6. Uses of the state: dialectics of reform in early progressive New York; 7. American Bastille: Sing Sing and the political crisis of imprisonment; 8. Changing the subject: the metamorphosis of prison reform in the high progressive era; 9. Laboratory of social justice: the new penologists at Sing Sing; 10. Punishment without labor: towards the modern penal state; Conclusion: on the crises of imprisonment.

Über Autor(innen)

McLennan, Rebecca M.
Rebecca M. McLennan is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She has also taught at Columbia University and Harvard University. She completed her graduate studies in American History at Columbia University, where her doctoral thesis on the making of the progressive penal state was awarded the Bancroft Prize for best dissertation in historical studies in 1999.