Crime and Punishment - based on The Crisis of Imprisonment by Rebecca M. McLennan (2008)

Moving away from the journey of enslaved Africans in American towards Emancipation, Rebecca McLennan's book The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (2008) traces the long history of convicts towards an abolition of their own. The U.S. penal system developed distinctly from the sanguinary, capital punishment system of Europe. In American taxonomy, a convict is inferior to the free laborer, and thus subjected to the intense "other-ing" that is endemic to our nation. Yet, even as convicts, their keepers and the general public sought to create institutions worthy of our founding ideals - even for the lowest classes in society - the convict class itself was stratified by race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation for generations, thus unnecessarily prolonging the path of reformation and intensifying the crisis within our prisons.

After the signing of the Declaration of Independence, new Americans had an ideology, a moral compass, to guide them in the business of empire-building. Freedom of choice, religion, the right to work and to participate in the fledgling democracy led the U.S. to call into question the legitimacy of European criminal institutions and treatment. Should life and death be in the hands of one, or even a few persons? The United States was not a monarchy or a dictatorship, as this interfered with the freedoms fought for in the new republic. Instead, the principle of proportionality was adopted early on, forcing prisoners to pay for their crimes to society with their time rather than their lives. In 1786, lawmakers began to experiment with deterrence theory, which favored a system of hard convict labor over that of capital punishment (33). The ensuing "wheelbarrow men" as the laboring convicts were dubbed, were quickly deemed "weak, failing, unrepublican and ugly" (35). As criticism and derision against the public spectacle of the wheelbarrow men intensified, the "house of repentance," today's penitentiary, came into view (36). The goal was not to goad prisoners into further criminal acts (as the mockery of the wheelbarrow men proved most useful for), but to compel a convict to submit to "soul surgery" and examine the consequences of previous decisions, while simultaneously keeping the general public at bay and in the dark as to what conditions convicts were subjected to within prison walls.

The penitentiary system was more humane than its predecessor, but negligible as to if it was more ethical or efficacious. Although servitude - involuntary or otherwise - was progressively frowned upon over the course of the nineteenth century, state government began to push hard, productive labor after 1830, which led to the contract prison labor system, under which convict labor was sold to private interests (54). Nonetheless, keepers and prison officials were keen to recognize a "relationship of dependency" (72) between convict and personnel. It behooved officials to treat convicts with dignity and respect. This realization paved the way for the field of penology to flourish during the Gilded Age and the early Progressive era, up to the country's decision to enter the Great War in 1917. The new convict was a "man" and socialized (gendered) to be a better man upon release. At times, this path of reformation was impeded by private interests, or public perception. It was always hindered by the racist and sexist notions of the eras, as women and blacks were routinely excluded from  - or extensively delayed the benefits of - reform by custom and law.

In connecting this text with the larger themes of citizenship and freedom from this semester's canon of historiography, McLennan skillfully portrays the convict as an "other" much like the enslaved or freed black American, whose livelihood, and democratic potential was in the hands of (other) white men. Several times she discusses the abolition of the contract prison labor system, or of socializing convicts to eventually fit the ideal of manhood, much in the way historians have pieced together white male perceptions of the black experience up to and beyond Emancipation. This verbiage necessitates a deeper read of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, as convicts are explicitly excluded from being full citizens, having the right to vote, and being free from slavery by any other name. This denial of democracy underscores the "other-ing" of convicts as now their history can be examined with methods similar to those used to flesh out the black experience in America.

McLennan focuses on the New York state penal system throughout the text, as New York was primed for reform with the established prisons at Auburn, Clinton and Sing Sing, as well as the melodrama of Tammany Hall, a New York political organization that produced several influential politicians who in turn produced several influential wardens. Outside of New York, McLennan tells of the status of prisons in other industrial states north of the Mason-Dixon line. This strengthens her narrative that hard, productive labor in industrial sectors propelled penal reforms. While Southern carceral patterns are introduced, they are not given the same exposure in McLennan's book. By including Southern penal institutions, McLennan would have been forced to step away from America's Industrial Revolution and center her research on the racism and sexism that plagued the South as evidenced in last week's read on the "problem South." For what the South lacked in legal, economic, social and public health advances, one can imagine McLennan's book as a very different text had Southern penal history been a larger part.

Despite America's history of enslavement of African Americans, in the 21st century Black prisoners in the Deep South were forced to pick cotton on former plantations or face disciplinary punishment. The 13th Amenment's prohibition on slavery expressly does not apply to incarcerated people. Pictured, prisoners at Parchman State Prison in Mississippi in 1996. (source: Twitter on 15 April 2015)

Eventually, McLennan shows that during the High Progressive era, penologists inspired by Thomas Mott Osborne used Sing Sing as a test case for a smorgasbord of social reforms intended to include the convict and understand his condition and proclivity to crime. It was during this time that prisoners formed internal democracies, circulated periodicals, formed intramural athletic leagues and undertook financial literacy training and general education courses. Under the ministrations of penal psychiatrist Bernard Glueck, strides were made in documenting and organizing data, especially that which lead an academic inquiry into the nature of homosexuality in prisons and the epidemiology of sexually transmitted diseases. On the watch of the "new penologists," prisoners received specialized health care (and "other-ing") for diagnoses of STDs and mental infirmities. Whereas Foucault argued that work gangs yielded the prison system, McLennan's argument is that the move from hard, productive, for-profit convict labor necessitated the modern penal institution. The new penology focused on the whole convict and not the capacity that was profitable. Both are correct in that work gangs were not a lasting solution, as convicts are people that cannot be reduced to beasts of burden. As rehabilitation became the only viable solution, the nature of the American penal system had to give. It's first steps are documented well in this text.

McLennan's book was extremely easy to read, although I admit to tiring of the word "crisis" used redundantly throughout. In the Acknowledgments, McLennan states that the book "originated as a doctoral dissertation and....matured as a book manuscript" (xi) before, over some time, it was published. My only critique is that the book lacks continuity, as within each chapter, I felt the need to wade through the redundant terms and information before getting to the argument at hand. I could tell that the author had developed this tome over time and as independent pieces; well done in that regard. She left no stone unturned in her patient dissection of this long history. McLennan is precise, thorough and efficient in her wrtiing. Her perspective is hers alone and represents a unique voice in the scholarship on penological reform in industrial America.


~ dls

The Problem - from "The Problem South: Region, Empire and the New Liberal State: 1890-1930" by Natalie J. Ring (2012)

I enjoyed this week's read immensely. Throughout the course of this semester, the texts tackled by myself and my cohort have journeyed through 19th-century America with an eye for issues concerning race, citizenship, gender and how the taxonomy of such arose and developed in our nation. In The Problem South by Dr Natalie J. Ring, we step beyond physical Reconstruction to a cultural Reconstruction that while it began in the South, impacted and continues to impact the entire country. As Dubois wrote in 1903, "the problem of the twentieth century, is the problem of the color-line" (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903).

Ring introduces Victorian sociocultural evolutionism as the method leading social scientists used to "diagnose" the "ills" of the South (44-45). This coincides with the voices of the class of black intellectuals of the era who wrote on the roots of American regionalism. These individuals of color were largely male, and academy-trained. They were sociologists, historians and anthropologists from some of the nation's leading Historically Black Institutions and primarily-white institutions as well. This book contextualizes the rise of social science and liberal arts education for black Americans and subsequently observes a shift of the the "burden of responsibility of blacks" to blacks themselves. During this era, my own alma mater where I received initial social science training was founded (134 years ago yesterday!). This book is useful in understanding the influence of all branches of social science not unlike Victorian sociocultural evolutionism, and the scholarship that emerged from black academics like DuBois and Miller, and lay-person ground-zero activists such as Ida B. Wells.

Ring also leans heavily on the rhetoric and metaphor of the time that frequently employed militaristic language (68) to combat the "Menace of the Diseased South" and the "White Plague of Cotton," the clever titles of the second and third chapters, respectively. Chapter two ties early tropical medicine and labor productivity to health outcomes among poor whites in the South. The region was beginning to be compared to "similar" locations worldwide, thus situating the American South in the larger "Global South." Chapter three exposes the banana republic status that King Cotton forced, and the Farm Demonstration Movement that saw the Federal Government push crop diversification and agricultural reform and efficiency - all of which challenged not only King Cotton, but the legacy of slavery. The Farm Demonstration Movement tied the natural sciences of entomology, geology and horticulture to the sociology, economics and again, comparative studies with other nations (123). These venues which operated their economies on a color-coordinated division of labor together made up the Global South.

In the sense that the North "occupied" the South financially (by means of commercial investment in slaves and cotton and legal control during Reconstruction) the South could be considered a colony no different from colonial contemporaries such as the Philippines and South Africa. So what then, if anything, makes the "problem" of the American South unique? The presence of Black Americans. No longer African, and no longer enslaved, the vociferous efforts of black people to obtain democracy in postbellum America were remarkable. Their initiative complicated the core of Southern society which was fixated on white supremacy. When industrial blacks began to aggressively pursue education and citizenship on their own terms and by their own means, the propaganda of the "forgotten man (and woman)" meaning the poor white, began to surface as a rebuttal (153). The recurring theme of Ring's book is the paradoxical nature of South, that for all her promise and potential, her dedication to racial taxonomies would mar her lovely nose to spite her face. The "problem" of the South was the South herself. Even as she pushed into the twentieth century full of momentum for educational reform and gender equality, she was hindered by a nostalgia for power to wield. As long as the "poor white" was white first, the South's desperate grab for racial privilege would plague its efforts to mature.

Often white reading, I found it difficult to situate this book chronologically. The symptoms that the North saw in the South I derisively identified today in the social trials that the ghosts of Sean Bell and Eric Garner had to endure because they had been Black men (in the North) during their lives, and arguably (?) killed for that same reason. The problem of the south remains a problem today with the myriad positive and negative responses to the police violence against blacks nationwide. Our nations leaders cannot agree or admit to the disease that is state-sanctioned violence against people of color. The whitewashing of the #BlackLivesMatter movement to #AllLivesMatter is my generation's "forgotton man" mantra. We can still examine the American problem (no longer Southern, if it were truly ever just that) with race in comparison to Brazil, South African and India among other places. The problems of yesteryear documented in Ring's text remain relevant, is problematic in itself.

The Hypocrisy of American Democracy - Black Reconstruction by W.E.B. DuBois (1935)

So for the past couple of weeks I've been tweeting about reading DuBois' prophetic, epic and encompassing tome Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880. Today I led a discussion on the text with two classmates in a graduate history seminar I'm enrolled in this term as an elective. I took the initiative to live tweet the discussion and summarize both the book and our class chat here.

1. On Democracy.

So in the introduction, DuBois notes that the original title, however subtle, was Black Reconstruction of Democracy in America. It was shortened by the editor, but the impact democracy had on the book was not lessened in the least. Democracy as DuBois defines it is access to education and political participation and representation. The "problem" of democracy as posed by leaders at the time of Reconstruction is if freed blacks receive the same "democracy" as whites, then the potential to have say in the direction of the country could be in the hands of any person of any color. This, was problematic. Using very Marxist labor language (classes, dictatorships, labor, demands, equality, et cetera) and a stunning arsenal of persuasive rhetoric, DuBois asserts that democracy as we envision it is a farce compared to democracy as it's actually applied. He affects a scolding tone to chastise the "poor white" worker for not joining his cause to that of the freed slave and focusing their joint strength on "capital," the wealthy planter class of the South or the Northern industrialists. Instead, DuBois laments, whites chose to maintain the color caste economic and political systems in place from slavery and failed to position the United States towards economic equality. In his book, democracy is not only a failed ideal, but a literary device. Democracy becomes a character alongside the freed black, the poor white and the planter. Democracy is intended to be a protagonist in the story of Reconstruction, but true events have framed democracy as anathema to what American seemed to really want: inequality and class wars.

2. On politicizing history.

Okay. So Black Reconstruction might have an agenda. It's hard to write a neutral telling of history especially when modern writers have the benefit of hindsight! But in his defense, DuBois did not set out to write a neutral history of Reconstruction. He was taking aim at the Dunning School which dominated the scholarship on Reconstruction at the time. The Dunning School espoused a white supremacist perspective and did nothing to acknowledge that this was the case. So the conclusion that Reconstruction was bad for the South was based on bias. DuBois makes it clear that the field was devoid of other perspectives, so he gets in front of any lean his book takes. Since DuBois is black and writing in the 1930s, one could assume he is going to defend the black and blaspheme the white antebellum way of life. But DuBois examines the impact of Emancipation on all characters, black and white, as well as the implications of "humanity" as this is in flux as well. While the nation reels from the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments which freed slaves, granted citizenship and voting rights, respectively, what is to be said of the white worker? Using President Andrew Johnson's (brief) time in the White House as a guide, we see that the identity of white America was just as fragile then too. Kudos to DuBois for showing us how to think and write outside of ourselves.

3. On writing style.

With over 700 pages of long history over the Reconstruction era, DuBois is surprisingly (and refreshingly) short on citations. No doubt, Black Reconstruction is the go-to for history buffs interested in the era, but at the time of its publication, DuBois was using broad, easily verifiable declarative statements to tell his story. Statistics on the number of slaves and non-slaveholding whites at the time of the Civil War, for example, give the scope of DuBois' America. Long quotations from leading politicians of the day are "google-able" and the oratorical excerpts (though lengthy) give the tone and feelings of uncertainty of yesteryear to the modern reader. And let's not neglect how DuBois waxes poetic at the end of each chapter, exploding in a flurry of descriptive words and imagery before capping each sections with a poem. Nice touch.

4. On Race and Class.

So which is the bad guy in this book? Race or class? Antebellum America was pretty delineated: you were either slave or free (which racially, means black or white) and if free, you either owned slaves (Planter class) or did not (poor white class). After Emancipation, DuBois says the nation would have been that much closer to solving the economic inequality issues we continue to see to this day, had the poor white denounced the color caste system and teamed up with the freed black against "capital;" which at the time, is the wealth-holding planter class of the South or the industrialists of the North. DuBois is heavily critical of the need to overpower the planters and industrialists. His own version of propaganda writing is then formulated from telling what "should have" happened and "why" it did not. Had the races joined together against, class, the racial and social upheavals that continue to manifest in the wake of Reconstruction could have been avoided.

5. On Gender.

DuBois speaks more of "mankind" and "men" then of women. This is not the text for how Reconstruction affected or was shaped by women, black or white.

6. On the legacy of Black Reconstruction.

In light of the larger scholarship of Reconstruction-era historiographies, Du Bois is the emphatic source of of the (largely) unbiased, long history of the time. 80 years after it's debut, modern historians are citing this book with surprising frequency, implying that DuBois' take on the era was ahead of his time, and after discounting for his own biases, was spot on for future intellectuals to tap into. It's an incredibly relevant book all these years later.

One day, I'll have my doctorate in economics and I will teach a class on the Economic History of Black America. Trust, this book will be on the reading list.

cheers,

dls