Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy by Mark E. Kann

Author:Mark E. Kann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2005-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Expected Outcomes

Reformers expected that the implementation of their recommendations would result in criminals’ removal from public venues and incarceration behind penitentiary walls, followed by their improved physical and mental health and gradual rehabilitation managed by the paternalistic public officials. “Cured” convicts would be restored to free society and free society would gain productive, law-abiding citizens who contributed to public order. Overall, crime would be prevented and reduced, and the American republic would be significantly better off.

Most reformers thought that convicts who were denied liberty by way of incarceration simultaneously regained a more meaningful version of liberty upon entering a penitentiary. The new inmate would find himself situated in a controlled environment that helped to free him from the overwhelming passions, destructive habits, abusive and neglectful parents, vicious companions, omnipresent temptations, and corrupt influences that had dominated his life and driven him to crime. The new inmate would soon be free from poor health. Eddy remarked, “Many of those who came into prison with constitutions greatly impaired by excessive drinking, debauchery, and vicious habits, after being some time used to the system of temperance, order, and industry established in the prison, have become healthy and vigorous.” As the inmate shed destructive habits and restored his health, he would acquire positive predispositions that afforded him greater mental clarity and greater control of his life. Solitude would invite him to seek meaning through introspection, remorse, and redemption. Hard labor would instill in him habits of industry and teach him skills that would allow him to contribute to his family’s well-being while in prison and prepare him for manly independence and respectability when released from prison. Moral and religious instruction would free him to recognize and choose the path of virtue, perhaps for the first time in his life. The inmate even might learn a degree of democratic self-government by joining with other inmates to establish and enforce informal prison regulations (for example, regulations regarding inmate cleanliness) that would improve the quality of convicts’ lives. Rather than dwelling on the lost liberty entailed by imprisonment, the reborn prisoner would feel empowered by his penitentiary experience and would express his “thankfulness” to prison officials for helping him to achieve a more disciplined, robust liberty.42

Reformers anticipated that prisoners who underwent rehabilitation regimens would be thankful—sooner or later. After all, reformers saw themselves as father figures guiding immature males to manhood, as ministers redeeming lost souls, and as physicians healing sick bodies and diseased minds. They loved to relate “well-authenticated cases of reformation” that demonstrated how once-dissolute criminals were transformed by penitentiary punishment into upstanding if not exemplary citizens. Reformers fully believed that rehabilitated convicts, on their discharge, would be free to start their lives over again, free to fulfill family responsibilities, free to achieve economic independence, free to enjoy social pastimes, and free to assume the rights and duties of citizenship. Each success story fortified reformers’ conviction that the penitentiary was not a traditional institution of vengeance but, as Pennsylvania inspectors suggested, “a school of reformation.”

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