Conclusion: On the Crises of Imprisonment

Summary

The foregoing pages relate the story of the great crisis of legitimacy that struck the American system of legal punishment in the Gilded Age and flesh out an account of the diverse, and often contradictory, reform efforts that this crisis precipitated. As we have seen, America's prison-based system of legal punishment, with which the early Republicans first tentatively experimented, and which the Jacksonians subsequently transformed and institutionalized (in the form of contractual penal servitude), was episodically shaken to its foundations by acute disciplinary, political, and ideological crises. At all times anchored in overlapping fields of power (the plane on which contractors encountered prison keepers and convict laborers, for example, and the fraught arena in which free workingmen grappled with employers and responded to the often violent, dislocating effects of industrialization), the prison proved both a site and an instrument in an ongoing negotiation between distinct segments of American society over the profound moral and political questions thrown up by the rise of industrial capitalism. Although only intermittently aflame in riot and rebellion or under siege from an outraged citizenry, the American prison existed (and arguably, still exists) in a permanent state of crisis. Rather than interpret the various crises of imprisonment as so many signs of the failure or defeat of well-intended penal reformers, I have tried to convey the ways in which the penal system's emergencies were at once destructive and creative.