The Chiefs Now in This City by Colin Calloway

Author:Colin Calloway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Many Western societies were replacing public executions with private punishments, and the debate over finding alternatives to the death penalty was especially acute in the United States after the Revolution.63 The Pennsylvania legislature reformed its penal system and also refashioned the jail itself to provide more capacity for solitary confinement and monitoring of the inmates’ behavior. In 1786 the legislature discontinued the public whipping post, reduced the number of capital offenses, and experimented with a program of public penal labor in the streets. Four years later it replaced public labor with imprisonment, and in 1794 it restricted capital punishment to cases of first-degree murder. Benjamin Rush took a leading role in implementing changes designed to transform individual character through imprisonment and solitary confinement, separating inmates from the public and subjecting them to a supervised life of discipline, labor, health, and morality in penitentiaries, rather than inflicting bodily violence as a spectacle in public.64 Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, a Polish visitor in the late 1790s, was so impressed with the prisons in Philadelphia that he thought there was not “in the world an establishment conceived with better judgment and more humanity.”65 Indian people, however, would have been appalled.

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