Reprint of the original, first published in 1874. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.

Both in the popular imagination and in academic discourse, North and South are presented as fundamentally divergent penal systems in the aftermath of the Civil War, a difference mapped onto larger perceived cultural disparities between the two regions. The South’s post Civil War embrace of chain gangs and convict leasing occupies such a prominent position in the nation’s imagination that it has come to represent one of the region’s hallmark differences from the North. The regions are different, the argument goes, because they punish differently. Capital and Convict challenges this assumption by offering a comparative study of Illinois’s and South Carolina’s formal state penal systems in the fifty years after the Civil War. Henry Kamerling argues that although punishment was racially inflected both during Reconstruction and after, shared, nonracial factors defined both states' penal systems throughout this period. The similarities in the lived experiences of inmates in both states suggest that the popular focus on the racial characteristics of southern punishment has shielded us from an examination of important underlying factors that prove just as central—if not more so—in shaping the realities of crime and punishment throughout the United States.

A new global history perspective on the relationship between convict mobility and governance, nation building, imperial expansion, and knowledge formation.

A compelling examination of the highly criticized use of long-term solitary confinement in Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary during the nineteenth century.

The opening, in 1876, of the Elmira Reformatory marked the birth of the American adult reformatory movement and the introduction of a new approach to crime and the treatment of criminals. Hailed as a reform panacea and the humane solution to America's ongoing crisis of crime and social disorder, Elmira sparked an ideological revolution. Repression and punishment were supposedly out. Academic and vocational education, military drill, indeterminate sentencing and parole—"benevolent reform"—were now considered instrumental to instilling in prisoners a respect for God, law, and capitalism. Not so, says Al Pisciotta, in this highly original, startling, and revealing work. Drawing upon previously unexamined sources from over a half-dozen states and a decade of research, Pisciotta explodes the myth that Elmira and other institutions of "the new penology" represented a significant advance in the treatment of criminals and youthful offenders. The much-touted programs failed to achieve their goals; instead, prisoners, under Superintendent Zebulon Brockway, considered the Father of American Corrections, were whipped with rubber hoses and two-foot leather straps, restricted to bread and water in dark dungeons during months of solitary confinement, and brutally subjected to a wide range of other draconian psychological and physical abuses intended to pound them into submission. Escapes, riots, violence, drugs, suicide, arson, and rape were the order of the day in these prisons, hardly conducive to the transformation of "dangerous criminal classes into Christian gentleman," as was claimed. Reflecting the racism and sexism in the social order in general, the new penology also legitimized the repression of the lower classes. Highlighting the disparity between promise and practice in America's prisons, Pisciotta draws on seven inmate case histories to illustrate convincingly that the "March of Progress" was nothing more than a reversion to the ways of old. In short, the adult reformatory movement promised benevolent reform but delivered benevolent repression—a pattern that continues to this day. A vital contribution to the history of crime, corrections, and criminal justice, this book will also have a major impact on our thinking about contemporary corrections and issues surrounding crime, punishment, and social control.

51st includes "Prison laws of the State of New York" (p. [157]-998)