In Defense of Flogging Read Online Free Page B

Howard’s vision, a small jail in Wymondham, England, was rebuilt in 1787 on the principles of hard labor, solitary confinement, and penance (hence the name “penitentiary”). Men and women were no longer allowed to mingle, and all prisoners were separated into individual cells where they ate, slept, and worked alone (inmate labor was supposed to pay for the prison’s upkeep, but it almost never does—forced labor is rarely good labor). The idea was for prisoners to remain in their
monk-like cells until, hallelujah, they were cured of their criminal ways. The miraculously religious imperative behind Howard’s system was shaky at best, and yet this little town jail became the basis for the penitentiary system in America and then the world.
    In the United States, Quaker reformers in Pennsylvania were the first to take up the penitentiary cause. The fact that Quakers are responsible for creating prisons may seem odd, but consider the potential appeal of solitary confinement to a denomination that formed in opposition to Calvinists’ belief in predestination, preached salvation through personal experience of the divine, and worshipped in silence. Rather than punishing criminals’ bodies, Quakers, like many other prison reformers, wanted to save their souls.
    So in 1787 the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons was established by Quaker-raised Benjamin Rush. The Society condemned the jails and public punishments of its time, proposing that isolating prisoners in solitary cells would be more effective than flogging. The key to this belief is a firm and paternalistic conviction that crime is a moral disease. Particularly galling to
reformers like Rush was the loose atmosphere of the era’s jails, with their alcohol and race-blind mixing of men and women. Although Rush, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, was perhaps America’s most respected doctor, the science he practiced was quite primitive. The good doctor, for instance, prescribed mercury as a curative, lanced patients to bleed them of bile, and believed that African Americans suffered from the possibly curable hereditary disease of “negroidism.” As they say, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. And Rush’s attitudes toward criminals were equally wrong.
    For reformers like Rush, the penitentiary ideas of John Howard and utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham offered a modern and scientific alternative to contemporaneous jails. Bentham’s Panopticon , written the same year Rush established the Prison Society, offered “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example . . . all by a simple idea in Architecture!” Today this sounds simultaneously naive and sinister, but Bentham’s Panopticon and “hedonic calculus”—people do what gives them the greatest pleasure—hugely influenced prison design and philosophy. The essential characteristic of the Panopticon
is total physical and psychological surveillance and control though a combination of isolation, monitoring, and “apparent omnipresence.” In practice, this meant a single, centrally located dark guard booth (dark so it could see but not be seen) with a direct line of sight to a stacked circle of surrounding cells.
    Pennsylvania overhauled its criminal code in 1790 based on the recommendations of Rush and his Society. The commonwealth abolished flogging and commissioned the establishment of America’s first “penitentiary.” It got off to a rocky start. To begin with, the location, a newly built annex of Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail, was problematic. Walnut Street Jail already had a boss, one John Reynolds—and he had been there for ten years. Reynolds wrote nothing for posterity, so we know of him mostly through his enemies, who called him “uncouth” and scorned him as an “unsympathetic hireling of the