Why, in the early nineteenth century, did imprisonment become the new standard in punishment? In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, most other forms of violence and stigma--the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post--were abandoned by state authorities. The death penalty endured, of course, but even the gallows were withdrawn from public view. Governments from Maine to Louisiana and beyond built massive penitentiaries to house their convicts.
There are several explanations--political, social, economic. Violent spectacles were associated with old-world despotism, and the new republic displayed its enlightenment by inflicting a more "humane" punishment that would seek to rehabilitate broken lives and save lost souls. As racial categories became central to group identities, the treatment of white criminals had to be distinguished from the brutality and terror that persisted on Southern plantations. With the rise of an industrial economy, the prison promised to exploit the labor of the condemned, rather than wasting their blood.
Now, a careful and perceptive historian offers a new book-length study of the crucial role of religion in the making of the early prison system. Jennifer Graber's The Furnace of Affliction shows how Protestant reformers shaped the ideals of moral instruction and spiritual reawakening that were enshrined in the institution known as the penitentiary--and how, in turn, the endeavor redefined religion's place in the public life of the nation.
Focusing on New York, whose experiments in incarceration became the models for many other states, Graber describes how Quakers, Congregationalists, and others refashioned both penalty and piety through their efforts to redeem the souls of the incarcerated. "They stressed a Christian faith," Graber writes of the reformers, "realized most significantly as moral living and obedience to governmental authority" (12).
In the end, religious leaders lost their prominence in defining the means and ends of punishment. Along the way, though, they had helped to build an institution riven by contradictions that have never been resolved:
"To some degree, the Protestant prison activists made a distinctive claim against inmate suffering. They registered a particular voice affirming prisoners' reformative potential. They argued strenuously for the connection between democracy and humane punishment. But in other ways, they contributed to the prison's development in all its cruelty. They advocated an institution that enclosed people against their will, forced them to labor, separated them from all human comforts, and deprived them of every freedom" (176).
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