Philadelphia Prisons of the Eighteenth Century

Sellin, Thorsten

doi:10.2307/1005687

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Slowly, in the middle of the twentieth century, slightly more critical accounts emerged (e.g., Lewis, 1965; Sellin, 1953, 1958), focusing greater attention on the gaps between theory and practice. However, it was really in the 1970s, as a more critical bent took shape across Western history departments and scholars moved from the Great Man histories to social histories’ ground-up approach, that a new prison historiography emerged in reaction to these earlier accounts.…”

Section: Three Approaches To Prison Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

True believers, rational actors, and bad actors: Placing The Prison and the Factory in penal-historiographic context

Rubin

2020

Punishment & Society

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Section: Three Approaches To Prison Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

True believers, rational actors, and bad actors: Placing The Prison and the Factory in penal-historiographic context

Rubin

2020

Punishment & Society

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“…The country's model prison, Philadelphia's Walnut Street Prison, had only sixteen solitary cells—a disproportionately small number for the prison's hundred (and later, more) prisoners (Teeters 1955, 19). Likewise, judges tended to avoid sentencing convicted criminals to any period in solitary confinement (Sellin 1953, 329). For both these reasons, solitary confinement was only used for short periods to punish in-prison infractions; due to the scarcity of cells and the frequent rule violations, however, solitary was often “the last, not the first, resort of discipline,” while punishment at the hands of the prison's administrators was the more common response (Meranze 1996, 196).…”

Section: Solitary Confinement Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Continuity in the Face of Penal Innovation: Revisiting the History of American Solitary Confinement

Rubin¹,

Reiter²

2018

Law soc. inq.

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Solitary confinement has been a perennial tool of control in US prisons, despite its status as a repeatedly delegitimized practice. Although there have been significant changes in punishment over time, solitary confinement has remained, mostly at the margins and always as a response to past failures, part of an unending search for greater control over prisoners. This history raises the question of how a discredited penal technology can nevertheless persist. We locate the source of this persistence in prison administrators' unflagging belief in solitary confinement as a last-resort tool of control. To maintain this highly criticized practice, prison administrators strategically revise, but never abandon, discredited practices in response to antecedent legitimacy struggles. Using solitary confinement as a case study, we demonstrate how penal technologies that violate current sensibilities can survive, despite changing macro-level social factors that otherwise explain penal change and practice, provided those technologies serve prison officials' internal goals.Solitary confinement, as a punishment for crime, has a very interesting history of its own, in almost all countries where imprisonment is one of the means of punishment.

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“…As a result of the new laws from the 1770s and 1780s, the growing reliance on incarceration and hard labor around the country put tremendous strain on and called attention to the conditions in local jails—mostly decrepit facilities suffering from overcrowding and disease. For example, in the late 1780s, while Pennsylvania’s Wheelbarrow Law was in force, Walnut Street Jail (which held the wheelbarrow men when they were not laboring in the streets) suffered rioting, fighting, disease, and frequent escapes (see Meranze, 1996; Sellin, 1953: 327). The conditions in which prisoners were held, moreover, prompted several “memorials” from the local penal reform society, the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons.…”

Section: Experimentation: Translating Idea Into Innovationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The prehistory of innovation: A longer view of penal change

Rubin

2017

Punishment & Society

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New penal technologies, however innovative, rarely emerge fully formed, but we currently lack a theoretical appreciation of the lengthy, messy process by which penal innovations develop. Indeed, most studies of penal change focus on the conditions surrounding the emergence of a particularly successful innovation, a model of punishment whose widespread diffusion is indicative of significant change. This paper extends our analytical focus by examining the legacy of an innovation’s prehistory, the ideational period in which an idea is created at the margins of criminal justice before manifesting on a wider scale. This paper traces the history, and influence, of American uses of penal incarceration before Pennsylvania’s famous Walnut Street Prison, often referred to as the country’s first prison. This prehistory complicates the notion of innovation by identifying significant precursors. Ultimately, recognizing penal innovations’ prehistory challenges macro-level theories of penal change, which largely overlook those causes that significantly predate the “moment” of innovation.

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Philadelphia Prisons of the Eighteenth Century

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

True believers, rational actors, and bad actors: Placing The Prison and the Factory in penal-historiographic context

True believers, rational actors, and bad actors: Placing The Prison and the Factory in penal-historiographic context

Continuity in the Face of Penal Innovation: Revisiting the History of American Solitary Confinement

The prehistory of innovation: A longer view of penal change

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