Rothman, David J.

The Prison

In Discovery of the Asylum, considered a classic account of prison history, Rothman asks a very straightforward question: Why the prison? Why not some other form of punishment? Why do we lock up criminals and institutionalize the insane? Why do we segregate and isolate the deviant and the vulnerable? Why did the prison replace the public whipping and execution of criminals? These questions appear so simple that we can easily underestimate their sophistication and significance. However, they are designed to challenge our very assumptions about the naturalness and logic of the prison. Even though humanitarians, state legislators, and elites turned away from capital punishment in the early 19th century, Rothman suggests that the prison was not the only viable alternative.

Rothman explains the emergence of the prison and other forms of confinement in the Jacksonian period (1820s–1830s) as an attempt to restore social order to a traditional society altered by revolution and democracy. The new republic experienced unprecedented social changes that increased both social mobility and dislocation. In post-revolutionary America, the nation's population and capitalist economy quickly expanded, people left family farms and moved into cities and migrated to the western territories in record numbers. The subsequent social and economic shifts undermined the social hierarchies of the colonial era and weakened the informal social controls of the family and church. At the same time, political authority moved away from the local community as states centralized their decision-making powers. These social and political shifts required a new response to crime as previous colonial forms of punishment—banishment, community policing, local justice—no longer made sense and lost their legitimacy.

Rothman explains that, as Americans broke away from English rule, they experienced a heightened sense of optimism about the new democratic society's ability to solve the problems of crime, poverty, insanity, and other signs of disorder. Reformers and legislators no longer blamed crime on the offender's sinful soul but rather thought crime [Page 861]to be a consequence of an unstable environment, overflowing with corruption. The prison would not only isolate offenders from temptation, but its well-ordered routine, discipline, and organization would serve as a model for the larger society, a society in need of social stability and social order.

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