History from the inside out: prison life in nineteenth-century Massachusetts

For legitimate reasons or otherwise, prisoners valued the opportunity to read and write. Under the early classification scheme, the board held out education as a reward precisely because the prisoners themselves had made clear the great value many of them placed on reading and writing. To prison officials this value meant that letters, newspapers, books - and even instruction in reading and writing - could be granted or withheld in exchange for good behavior. From the practical standpoint of institutional order, the power of this bargaining chip might easily overwhelm the fundamental if more abstract goal of individual rehabilitation.

Here as in other respects, the evolution of the penitentiary was a process of negotiation, though among parties who were far from equal. But if the chip was safely in the hands of the directors, it derived its value largely from the actions of the prisoners. However unbalanced the distribution of power in this arrangement, it nonetheless insured that prisoners as well as their captors influenced the development of the institution. To the extent that historians of the prison have neglected this element, they have trapped themselves in debates about the nature of elite power - whether construed as state power, class exploitation, or the controlling motives of idealistic reformers with a penchant for order. One of the key contributions of social history, however, has been its emphasis on the agency of the dispossessed, and its recognition of the relational nature of power. Power comes from above, but it is conditioned in significant ways by the actions of those it operates upon. Future research into the history of the prison can make greater use of this insight by paying closer attention to those inside the prison, both prisoners and the officials in closest proximity to them: watchmen, turnkeys, workshop overseers, Sabbath school teachers, and other lower-level staff. The penitentiary did not spring fully formed from the heads of its designers. It was, on the contrary, a provisional work of moral and physical architecture, a malleable form, subject to a variety of often contradictory pressures, both within and without, exerted by politicians, the public, reformers, administrators, and guards - as well as the prisoners themselves.

Department of History Hiram, OH 44234

ENDNOTES

I am very grateful for the assistance of a Littleton-Griswold Research Grant from the American Historical Association, a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Gerstacker-Gund Faculty Grant from Hiram College. Thanks also to Paula Baker, Brian Flynn, Michael Katz, and Libby Smith for encouragement and helpful criticism.

1. "Extract from Gov. Lincoln's Message, Jan. 1826," in Reports of the Prison Discipline Society of Boston (1826-54; reprint ed., Montclair, N.J., 1972), First Annual Report (1826), 43. References to this source are hereafter cited thus: PDSB 1 (1826), 43. Page references are to the numbers at the inner margins of the reprint edition.