Suchergebnisse

"At a time when prisons were still new, and nearly every prison in the country followed the same model of confinement, Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (opened in 1829) was known for its exceptional reliance on long-term solitary confinement. Eastern was criticized for its exceptional reliance on what was seen as an inhumane, expensive, and ineffective approach to confinement. Why did it persist in its deviance? This book traces the process by which Eastern's criticized method of confinement became institutionalized for its administrators. Often working against the opposition of the local penal reformers and state legislature, Eastern's administrators fought both publicly and behind the scenes to maintain their unique approach because of the particular value it offered them. Ultimately, this study retells the history of nineteenth century prison innovation and diffusion from the perspective of those actors most demonized within the penal field. It offers multiple lessons for understanding penal trends, including the way in which anxiety that about significant penal change shapes penal actors' decisions. It also illustrates how organizations, including state-run organizations, can continuously defy legal, penal, and cultural norms in ways standard organizational theories cannot explain"--

Early nineteenth-century American prisons followed one of two dominant models: the Auburn system, in which prisoners performed factory-style labor by day and were placed in solitary confinement at night, and the Pennsylvania system, where prisoners faced 24-hour solitary confinement for the duration of their sentences. By the close of the Civil War, the majority of prisons in the United States had adopted the Auburn system - the only exception was Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, making it the subject of much criticism and a fascinating outlier. Using the Eastern State Penitentiary as a case study, The Deviant Prison brings to light anxieties and other challenges of nineteenth-century prison administration that helped embed our prison system as we know it today. Drawing on organizational theory and providing a rich account of prison life, the institution, and key actors, Ashley T. Rubin examines why Eastern's administrators clung to what was increasingly viewed as an outdated and inhuman model of prison - and what their commitment tells us about penal reform in an era when prisons were still new and carefully scrutinized.

Although the study of penal changes throughout history is central to punishment studies, the field has taken little from historical institutionalists' theories of institutional change. One of the most relevant such theories is path dependence. This article outlines path dependence frameworks' most fruitful elements for studying penal change. Drawing on foundational political science and historical sociology texts, as well as several punishment scholars' works, this article highlights the advantages of thinking through stasis and change, mechanisms of inertia such as feedback effects, and exogenous shocks. While path dependence offers a powerful framework, it can also be an unsatisfying explanation at times, particularly when path dependence is itself a seemingly uphill battle, when apparent stasis hides ongoing change, or when institutions survive hypothesized mechanisms of change. This paper closes by discussing some ways in which punishment scholars can strengthen the path dependence framework by blending it with recent theoretical developments in the punishment studies field.

AbstractIn 1921, American prison administrator and reformer, Spencer Miller, was invited to describe America's recent penal developments to the Howard League for Penal Reform. This article reviews the context of Progressive Era American prisons to better understand Miller's remarks and their lessons for prison administrators and reformers today. It briefly describes the history of American prisons into the Progressive Era as well as some developments that were most relevant to Miller, viz., the reforms at Sing Sing under famed penal reformer and warden, Thomas Mott Osborne. Next, the article reviews Miller's statement to the Howard League for Penal Reform, including his inaccurate description of prison history, which can be read as a means of emphasising the extraordinary progress made by Osborne and, implicitly, by Miller at Sing Sing and as an example to the nation. Finally, it discusses Miller's abolitionism in the context of similar discussions taking place today.

New penal technologies, however innovative, rarely emerge fully formed, but we currently lack a theoretical appreciation of the lengthy, messy process by which penal innovations develop. Indeed, most studies of penal change focus on the conditions surrounding the emergence of a particularly successful innovation, a model of punishment whose widespread diffusion is indicative of significant change. This paper extends our analytical focus by examining the legacy of an innovation's prehistory, the ideational period in which an idea is created at the margins of criminal justice before manifesting on a wider scale. This paper traces the history, and influence, of American uses of penal incarceration before Pennsylvania's famous Walnut Street Prison, often referred to as the country's first prison. This prehistory complicates the notion of innovation by identifying significant precursors. Ultimately, recognizing penal innovations' prehistory challenges macro-level theories of penal change, which largely overlook those causes that significantly predate the "moment" of innovation.

Recently, scholars have increasingly criticized descriptions of significant penal change as "ruptures"—sudden breaks with past practices, often replacing old technologies with new. This article promotes an alternative understanding of penal change as the layering of new penal technologies over old technologies to describe the complicated coexistence of old and new penal technologies following significant moments of change. This study demonstrates the layering process through a case study of the first major American penal reform: proto-prisons adopted between 1785 and 1822 are often described as the first great rupture in which long-term incarceration replaced capital punishment. Using the relationship between America's emerging proto-prisons and declining death penalty, this article illustrates the complicated coexistence of penal reforms with older technologies. While proto-prisons emerged out of revulsion with capital punishment, many states adopted proto-prisons independently of their decisions to reduce capital offenses and most states retained relatively robust death penalties. Rather than a replacement or rupture, the emergence of proto-prisons represented an additional layer of punishment that partially displaced older technologies.

I examine the puzzling case of Eastern State Penitentiary and its long-term retention of a unique mode of confinement between 1829 and 1875. Most prisons built in the nineteenth century followed the "Auburn System" of congregate confinement in which inmates worked daily in factory-like settings and retreated at night to solitary confinement. By contrast, Eastern State Penitentiary (f. 1829, Philadelphia) followed the "Pennsylvania System" of separate confinement in which each inmate was confined to his own cell for the duration of his sentence, engaging in workshop-style labor and receiving religious ministries, education, and visits from selected personnel. Between 1829 and the 1860s, Eastern faced strong pressures to conform to field-wide norms and adopt the Auburn System. As the progenitor of the Pennsylvania System, Eastern became the target of a debate raging over the appropriate model of "prison discipline." Supporters of the Auburn System (penal reformers and other prisons' administrators) propagated calumnious myths, arguing that the Pennsylvania System was cruel and inhumane, dangerous to inmates' physical and mental health, too expensive, and simply impractical and ineffective. Largely as a result of these myths, only three other prisons followed this model, including another prison in Pennsylvania, Western State Penitentiary. However, by the Civil War, all three prisons abandoned the System in practice and then formally rejected it, citing the manifestation of the myths at their prisons. Eastern maintained its allegiance. Even after overcrowding struck in 1866, making separation for all inmates impossible, Eastern's administrators continued to aspire to their Pennsylvania System. In the years after the Civil War, the Auburn-Pennsylvania debate faded and penal reformers moved on to new issues. The carceral field grew less isomorphic (homogeneous) as new facilities (adult reformatories in the North and plantation-style prisons in the South) emerged. The Auburn System itself had to evolve as new challenges emerged. The earlier pressures to conform had declined by the late 1870s. Ironically, it was in this context that Eastern effectively, but quietly, abandoned the Pennsylvania System. While legislative authorization continued until 1913, the Pennsylvania System was virtually unrecognizable at Eastern by the late 1870s as administrators sought to deal with an ever-growing prison population by double-celling inmates in violation of the principle of separate confinement to which they subscribed. As one of the first modern prisons, the progenitor of a distinctive mode of confinement, and an exception to the historical trend, Eastern is one of the most famous prisons in penal history. However, its lengthy and exceptional retention of the Pennsylvania System remains significantly under-theorized. Instead, scholars have largely sought to explain Eastern's initial adoption of the Pennsylvania System, focusing on the unique features of that system (e.g., Dumm, 1987; Rothman, 1971; Rusche and Kirchheimer, 1939; see also Meranze, 1996). This study seeks to determine how and why the Pennsylvania System remained the model of confinement at Eastern despite pressures that encouraged conformity to a different model of confinement. I employ historical content analyses of archival materials consisting of a wide range of primary-source documents relating to the prison. These documents include Eastern's widely circulated Annual Reports to the legislature, private documents maintained by Eastern personnel and penal reformers that reveal actual practice at Eastern, and penal reform literature and penal legislation from across the United States that provide insights into the pressures from the field. I find that the most important factor behind the Pennsylvania System's longevity at Eastern was the long-lasting support of its administrators (administrative support). While local penal reformers were useful in maintaining the statutory authorization of the Pennsylvania System and defending it against criticism from the field, they had little influence over public or private organizational behavior at Eastern. Moreover, legislative authorization was likely only minimally significant as the authority of the legislature, including actual legislation, was often disregarded by prison administrators, who saw themselves as the proper authority on penological matters. Thus, available countervailing forces were quite weak and unlikely to have played a significant role in overcoming pressures towards conformity. Apparently promising contextual explanations, moreover, fall apart upon investigation. Counterfactual evidence provides the most promising guidance: The lack of administrative support at other prisons that adopted the Pennsylvania System was highly significant in its failure at those prisons. At Eastern, by contrast, prison administrators maintained constant support of the Pennsylvania System&mdashoften in ways that mitigated against the same factors that led other prisons' administrators to abandon the Pennsylvania System for more efficient methods. Through vehement rhetorical defenses, Eastern's administrators countered the veracity of reformers' unflattering myths. Administrators also imposed strategic marginal alterations of the Pennsylvania System, manipulating features of their system to reduce its vulnerability to manifestations of the calumnious myths. Through these two tactics, they protected the Pennsylvania System at Eastern from factors that caused its demise at other prisons. Why did Eastern's administrators expend this effort to protect an unpopular system of prison discipline? I suggest that retaining the Pennsylvania System at Eastern offered administrators particular benefits that overcame the challenges associated with exceptionalism. Specifically, I argue that the Pennsylvania System had become institutionalized (Selznick, 1949, 1957) at Eastern in the sense that it was meaningful to Eastern's administrators beyond its utility as a basic set of instructions regarding how to incarcerate criminals to achieve their reformation, deterrence, or punishment. Instead, the Pennsylvania System offered administrators certain phenomenological benefits (Whetten, 2006) such that it was in their interest to maintain and publicly defend the Pennsylvania System. First, as a distinctive structure increasingly unique to Eastern, the Pennsylvania System offered administrators a status identity both indirectly (through their affiliation with and endorsement of a system they described as humanitarian and generally superior to alternatives) and directly (through their claims of their own benevolence and professional expertise). Importantly, these sources of status identity were only available if administrators retained the Pennsylvania System, and they were strengthened through administrators' rhetorical defenses of the Pennsylvania System. Moreover, affirming this status identity may have alleviated existential anxiety among administrators, who faced normative criticism from the field. Second, protecting the public image of the Pennsylvania System constituted an imperative for administrative decision making when actual implementation proved problematic. When faced with conflicting goals, vague instructions that failed to cover all eventualities, and material challenges to implementation, the need to protect the Pennsylvania System&mdashto make it look good, to preserve it at Eastern&mdashoffered clarity. Having this imperative may have alleviated epistemic anxiety among administrators, who faced exacerbated levels of uncertainty from the ambiguities in their goals and technology and no guidance (no external model) from the field. Thus, the status identity and imperative rendered the Pennsylvania System valuable to Eastern's administrators, despite the challenges. Indeed, administrative support continued until the Pennsylvania System no longer provided these benefits. By the 1870s, the field had moved on: the debate was over, as was the need to defend the Pennsylvania System&mdashthe Pennsylvania System had clearly lost&mdashand it was no longer a source of distinction. While administrators retained the name, they began to change the core of the principle. No longer infused with value, the Pennsylvania System became expendable.