Abstract
This essay analyzes the humanitarian activist Dorothea Dix's writings on prisons in the 1840s to unpack her rhetoric of rehabilitation, a rhetorical strategy that underpinned the discourse and arguments surrounding criminal punishment for many decades following the rise of the prison in the early nineteenth century. The essay argues that Dix wove together distinct, yet interrelated rhetorical strategies in her effort to support prisoners' development toward moral perfection. Despite Dix's emphasis on rehabilitation, such arguments helped to legitimize the prison as an institution, as well as the attendant conception of a criminal underclass that must be spirited out of public sight. I discuss the implications of the analysis for contemporary scholarship on discourse surrounding the prison-industrial complex.
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