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“A College of Morals”: Educational Reform at San Quentin Prison, 1880–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Benjamin Justice
Benjamin Justice*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

Since the early nineteenth century, the idea of American prisons, like the idea of common schools, has reflected a faith in public institutions for effecting social reform through individual transformation. With this goal in mind, penal theory has been a type of educational theory, making a systematic, sustained effort to “correct” the behavior and ideas of inmates. What has set penal theory apart from educational theory—and prisons apart from schools—are other social functions of imprisonment: retribution for crimes committed, custodial control that separates the inmate from society, and deterrence. The goal of punishment has dominated the evolution of American prisons; nevertheless, as “total” institutions prisons have had their own paeadia and this paeadia—along with its relationship to punishment—has changed significantly over time.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , Fall 2000 , pp. 279 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 For such a view of education I rely on Lawrence Cremin's expansive definition: “the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, values, attitudes, skills, and sensibilities, as well as any learning that results from that effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended,” as cited in American Education: The Metropolitan Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), x. I also thank Cremin for the term paeadia.Google Scholar

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