Author | Adam J. Hirsch |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Subject | Corrections, Prisons, Massachusetts History - Prisons United States History |
Genre | Sociohistorical nonfiction |
Set in | Northeastern United States, Massachusetts |
Published | June 24, 1992 |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Media type | Print, e-book, audio |
Pages | 243 |
ISBN | 9780300042979 |
OCLC | 24905782 |
Website | Official website |
The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America is a history of the origins of the penitentiary in the United States, depicting its beginnings and expansion. It was written by Adam J. Hirsch and published by Yale University Press on June 24, 1992. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
This book explores the ideas used to justify imprisoning people as punishment in the early United States. Hirsch, the author, uses Massachusetts as the template. He traces how ideas about prisons transition from being discussed in theory to becoming physical buildings and implemented systems. Hirsch also shows that there wasn't just one compelling reason behind favoring penitentiaries as a solution. There were many conflicting beliefs. Thus, this made prison philosophy complicated and ultimately deficient. [1]
Hirsch argues that the idea of using prisons as punishment was based on three different lines of thinking that came together. First, there were ideas from 17th century England about workhouses. It was believed that workhouses reduce crime and poverty by teaching new skills to people who were incarcerated. Second, there was the 18th century European concept of "rational criminology." This approach suggested that if punishments were consistent and not based on the death penalty, crime could be controlled by the state. Finally, derived from late 18th century England was the idea of "reclamation." This humanitarian belief held that prisons could not only retrain people, but actually change their entire personality and character. [1]
Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.
Criminal justice is the delivery of justice to those who have been accused of committing crimes. The criminal justice system is a series of government agencies and institutions. Goals include the rehabilitation of offenders, preventing other crimes, and moral support for victims. The primary institutions of the criminal justice system are the police, prosecution and defense lawyers, the courts and the prisons system.
A reformatory or reformatory school is a youth detention center or an adult correctional facility popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Western countries. In the United Kingdom and United States, they came out of social concerns about cities, poverty, immigration, and gender following industrialization, as well as from a shift in penology to reforming instead of punishing the criminal. They were traditionally single-sex institutions that relied on education, vocational training, and removal from the city. Although their use declined throughout the 20th century, their impact can be seen in practices like the United States' continued implementation of parole and the indeterminate sentence.
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 is a Pulitzer Prize–winning book written by historian Daniel Walker Howe. Published in 2007 as part of the Oxford History of the United States series, the book offers a synthesis history of the early-nineteenth-century United States in a braided narrative that interweaves accounts of national politics, new communication technologies, emergent religions, and mass reform movements. The winner of multiple book prizes, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for History, reviewers widely praised What Hath God Wrought. Historian Richard Carwardine said it "lays powerful claim to being the best work ever written on this period of the American past".
Imprisonment began to replace other forms of criminal punishment in the United States just before the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed as early as the first sovereign states. In colonial times, courts and magistrates would impose punishments including fines, forced labor, public restraint, flogging, maiming, and death, with sheriffs detaining some defendants awaiting trial. The use of confinement as a punishment in itself was originally seen as a more humane alternative to capital and corporal punishment, especially among Quakers in Pennsylvania. Prison building efforts in the United States came in three major waves. The first began during the Jacksonian Era and led to the widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War. The second began after the Civil War and gained momentum during the Progressive Era, bringing a number of new mechanisms—such as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing—into the mainstream of American penal practice. Finally, since the early 1970s, the United States has engaged in a historically unprecedented expansion of its imprisonment systems at both the federal and state level. Since 1973, the number of incarcerated persons in the United States has increased five-fold. Now, about 2,200,000 people, or 3.2 percent of the adult population, are imprisoned in the United States, and about 7,000,000 are under supervision of some form in the correctional system, including parole and probation. Periods of prison construction and reform produced major changes in the structure of prison systems and their missions, the responsibilities of federal and state agencies for administering and supervising them, as well as the legal and political status of prisoners themselves.
Heterodoxy was the name adopted by a feminist debating group in Greenwich Village, New York City, in the early 20th century. It was notable for providing a forum for the development of more radical conceptions of feminism than the suffrage and women's club movements of the time. The heterodoxy club was also known to be a space filled with people living remarkably diverse personal lives, allowing for women to congregate and talk about their experiences with one another in what was considered to be a safe space for conversation and change. The group was considered important in the origins of American feminism.
Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America is a work of Native American history by historian Daniel K. Richter that investigates the settlement of North America by Europeans from the perspective of American Indians. The book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002.
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Edith Belle Gelles is an American author and historian. She grew up in Lake Placid, New York, and attended Cornell University, Yale University, and the University of California, Irvine. She is currently a Senior Scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University where she has been a faculty member since 1983. Her scholarship is primarily in the area of early American history, concentrating on biography and women. She is known for her scholarship and writing about Abigail Adams and her husband John.
Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America is a history book by Jen Manion, a professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College, published in 2015 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The book was awarded the 2016 Mary Kelley Book Prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
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This is a select bibliography of English-language books and journal articles about the history of Ukraine. Book entries have references to journal reviews about them when helpful and available. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below. See the bibliography section for several additional book and chapter-length bibliographies from academic publishers and online bibliographies from historical associations and academic institutions.
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This is a select bibliography of English language books and journal articles about the history of Belarus and Byelorussia. A brief selection of English translations of primary sources is included. Book entries have references to journal articles and reviews about them when helpful. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below. The External links section contains entries for publicly available select bibliographies from universities.
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Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs: Social Theory and the History of Punishment in Nineteenth-Century America is a non-fiction book written by Mark Colvin. It was published by St. Martin's Press in 1997. In this book, Colvin applies theoretical perspectives to changes in punishment that occurred in the United States penal system during the 19th century.