The Crisis of Imprisonment

Rebecca M. McLennan is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She has also taught at Columbia University and Harvard University. She completed her graduate studies in American History at Columbia University, where her doctoral thesis on the making of the progressive penal state was awarded the Bancroft Prize for best dissertation in historical studies in 1999.

• Introduction: the grounds of legal punishment; 1. Strains of servitude: legal punishment in the early republic; 2. Due convictions: contractual penal servitude and its discontents; 3. Commerce upon the throne: the business of imprisonment in Gilded Age America; 4. Disciplining the state, civilizing the market: the abolition of contract prison labor; 5. A model servitude: prison reform in the early progressive era; 6. Uses of the state: dialectics of reform in early progressive New York; 7. American Bastille: Sing Sing and the political crisis of imprisonment; 8. Changing the subject: the metamorphosis of prison reform in the high progressive era; 9. Laboratory of social justice: the new penologists at Sing Sing; 10. Punishment without labor: towards the modern penal state; Conclusion: on the crises of imprisonment.

"Deeply researched and deeply reflective, The Crisis of Imprisonment redefines the central themes of 19th and early 20th century American prison history. Its story of the rise and fall of contractual penal servitude shows how questions of imprisonment, prison labor, and the treatment of prisoners lay at the heart of ongoing struggles over the meaning of freedom and unfreedom in America. Few scholars have succeeded so well in tracing the reciprocal relations between the institutions of punishment and the broader fields of economic and political power with which they are connected. Written with clarity and conviction, this is a major new work on the formation of the American penal state." - David Garland, New York University