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Reviewed by: Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America by Jen Manion Paul Kahan Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. By Jen Manion. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 296pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $45.) Liberty’s Prisoners is a useful and well-researched analysis of American carceral history that uses Philadelphia as a case study. An associate professor in the History Department at Amherst College, Manion is heavily indebted to David J. Rothman’s seminal The Discovery of the Asylum in that she, like he, sees the emergence of penitentiaries as a response to social and political disorder. Her primary contribution is to push back the historical time period; whereas Rothman argues that penitentiaries were embraced by social reformers anxious about the upheavals of the Jacksonian era, Manion posits that a “diverse group of elite white men had a great deal at stake in reestablishing social order and hierarchy in the aftermath of the American Revolution.” They did this, Manion asserts, by “defining themselves against an increasingly vocal and growing group of others—free blacks, laborers, immigrants, and women” (3). Whereas Rothman’s analysis was basically along fault lines of class, Manion expands this to include issues of race, gender, and sexuality. For instance, in chapter 3 she explores how “public women challenged patriarchal authority and ideals” and how Philadelphia’s elites responded by criminalizing the city’s street culture (85). Manion demonstrates that the criminalization of sex work was the “tip of the spear” in the sense that it legitimized criticisms of women working outside the home. In chapter 4, Manion convincingly argues that even seemingly progressive white elites nonetheless used the threat of incarceration to foreclose “the possibilities that post-Revolutionary emancipation presented,” thereby strengthening the prewar racial hierarchy and “laying the foundation for a carceral state that has stigmatized, criminalized, and destroyed African American individuals, families, and communities ever since” (152). These are useful, if not particularly surprising, revelations. However, Manion’s chapter on sentimentality is Liberty’s Prisoners true gem and well worth the cost of the book. Manion argues that the war for independence, the Enlightenment, and the Great Awakening “shaped a culture of humanitarian sensibility among elite and middling men and women” (48). She notes the tension these sources created, calling it an “uneasy balancing act” and demonstrating how sensibility “became a vehicle for the naturalization of sexual differences while imposing upper- and middle-class family values on predominantly African-American and Irish working and poor people” (49–50). In sum, there is much to recommend Liberty’s Prisoners, though it will likely appeal most to historians interested in the history of American corrections, women’s studies, and sexuality studies. That the story Manion tells has been ably told before in no way diminishes Liberty’s Prisoners; it is an important, if not essential, work on the history of American penitentiaries. [End Page 118] Paul Kahan Ardmore, PA Copyright © 2018 The Historical Society of Pennsylvania