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Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America JEN MANION Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015 296 pp.
The foundational histories of the rise of the Anglo-American penal state published in the United States in the 1970s shone a bright spotlight on its techniques of domination and the political and ideological underpinnings of its carceral power. Together, David J. Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971), Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977, trans. Alan Sheridan), and Michael Ignatieff's A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (1978) described a revolution in authority in the fifty years either side of 1800 in which the penitentiary displaced the scaffold as the preeminent machinery of social control, and the soul displaced the body as the target of punishment.
According to Rothman, the rise of new corrective institutions like penitentiaries in early national America was the product of elite anxieties regarding rising immigration and urbanization, crumbling social deference, and the spread of market capitalism. Taking on the mantle of philanthropic reformers, a generation of genteel and generally devout professional men- among them Benjamin Rush, Jacob Rush, Thomas McKean, Tench Coxe, William Bradford, and Bishop William White-promoted carceral corrections as an enlightened and benevolent means to try to restore stability to a society they believed was in dangerous flux.
Jen Manion's new book is part of a second wave of research that is adding nuance, context, and contingency to these enduring claims. Though its geographically encompassing subtitle would seem to suggest otherwise, Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America is a study of the expansion of penal power in a single city: Philadelphia. The site of the Con- stitutional Convention and the largest and most important urban center in early national America, Philadelphia was the locus of every significant public debate about the practice of punishment in the half century after the American Revolution.
Famously, Philadelphia is also the birthplace of the world's first modern prison. That grand, hulking edifice, Eastern State Penitentiary, opened for business on the edge of the city in 1829. The original design, conceived by the English-born architect John Haviland, envisaged a radial arrangement of seven cellblocks comprising 252 solitary...