7: Prisons Pt. 2

Question 1

jails

Answer 1

places designed primarily to hold/contain people
- not just convicted criminals or not even criminals at all

privately operated for profit

Question 2

punishment in jails

Answer 2

corporal punishment

painful public death

Question 3

18th century penal reformers

Answer 3

rethinking punishment, what it should seek to do and how it should be operationalised

Question 4

core ideas of the 18th century penal reformers

Answer 4

pauperism linked to criminality

criminality as environmental - learned

work can morally reform

institutional hypothesis

formulated the idea that by segregating people who committed crimes from other potentially criminal elements, they could be re-socialised through hard labour to be morally upstanding citizens of society

Question 5

• institutional hypothesis

Answer 5

hypothesis that the mass of the poor, idle and vagabonds should be forcibly confined and that public administration would provide education through work

responsibility of the government to deal with society’s outcasts

Question 6

• prison

Answer 6

institution where we punish convicted offenders with long-term confinement

unlike jails

questions of long-term effects and whether it would be financially sustainable

Question 7

• proto-prisons

Answer 7

attempts to put into action/practice the new reformist ideas of the prison

in theory:
- solitary confinement 24/7
- state-run
- rule of total silence but worship and meditation
- therapeutic labour of an artisan nature

Question 8

the execution of proto-prisons

Answer 8

overcrowding
- in the 1800s, solitary confinement abandoned immediately
- worsened in 1810s with supposed crime wave and economic depression (after war with the UK)

move towards solitary confinement only for the most serious offenders

administrative apathy/disciplinary oversight
- not executing control necessary so many escapes, riots, etc.

overcrowding and underfunding so need for new ways to generate revenue
- work transitions from being purely therapeutic towards a means to recoup costs
- unfree prison labour not productive and competitive

Question 9

Auburn (New York)

Answer 9

attempts to pioneer reform of the new reformist model of the proto-prison after prison riots in the 1810s

plan:
- solitary confinement by night, communal work by day
- rule of absolute silence
- work similar to factory work oriented towards being productive and profitable
- privileges/benefits as an inmate from how well you work

execution:
- mental/physical health disaster
- continued high rates of recidivism
- cost-inefficient

Question 10

Eastern State (Philadelphia)

Answer 10

response to shortcomings of the porto-prison model by doubling down on the original idea

adjustments:
- full sentences served in larger rooms but still strict solitary confinement
- individual plumbing
- weekly visits from reformers/educators/religious leaders to help in moral education and personal/spiritual reform
- artisanal labour for therapeutic purposes
- access to the outdoors

success?
- corporal punishment still widely used
- issues of overcrowding overcame the model (closed in 1913)

Question 11

what do we continuously see with solitary confinement?

Answer 11

penal reform movements around punishment always restrict themselves to respond to incarceration but never the broader premise that incarceration should be the type of punishment we use in the first place