Penal Reform and Progressive Ideology

Abstract

In the September 1979 volume of this journal Gerald Grob criticized social historians who seek to explain societal responses to deviance and dependence in terms of the goal of social control. Grob's answer to such historians is that, by definition, all societies seek to implement this goal in some fashion; the question for social history, however, is why a given society chooses the social control mechanisms that it does. Grob's criterion is a just one, though his criticism is not. The most adventurous flights of social historiography try to trace the causes of the changes they survey. Douglas Hay, and others working in the tradition of E. P. Thompson, linked changes in English crime and punishment during the eighteenth century to a transformation in property relationships in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (1977). Michael Ignatieff specifically linked the rise of incarcerative institutions in England to the needs of ascendant industry in A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (1978). These works followed in the footsteps of Georg Rusche and Otto Kircheimer's methodologically primitive but pioneering Punishment and Social Structure (1939). In Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975) Michel Foucault related the development of such institutions in France and elsewhere to a transformation in the Western conception of the self, articulated by the then ascendant human sciences, and in The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1972) David J. Rothman explained the same phenomenon in America as a defensive reaction to a perceived breakdown in the communal bonds that had characterized prerevolutionary society. Such studies are strong stuff-heady mixtures of intellectual history, cultural anthropology, and detailed documentary research. Though in some sense a sequel to The Discovery of the Asylum, Rothman's Conscience and Convenience is a somewhat humbler sort of stew. In Conscience and Convenience, Rothman examines the development of a series of related responses