Pits, Pendulums, and Penitentiaries: Reframing the Detained Subject

Abstract

In the late-eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century United States, both the Auburn and Philadelphia prisons put new models of penal detention into practice.1 Despite some divergences in theory and practice, both penitentiary systems framed detention as a means of reformation. Both also emphasized, albeit differently, the importance of silence within this detention, based on the assumption that silence would lead to personal reflection and that sufficient personal reflection would bring about individual reformation and redemption, which would, in turn, result in behavioral changes. Arising from principles of both rationality and sensibility, these new penitentiary theories were outlined by Jeremy Bentham, as Foucault famously discusses. They were also supported by U.S. founding father Benjamin Rush. In a 1787 statement that helped to found the U.S. penitentiary movement, Rush wrote against such public punishments as were meted out under the Wheelbarrow Law, arguing that The reformation of the criminal can never be effected by a public punishment (4).2 If left in isolation, however, the prisoner could be reformed. William Roscoe, writing in 1819 of the Philadelphia penitentiaries, agrees: Solitary confinement . . . seems necessary to produce any beneficial effect on the habits and character of criminals; not only as it prevents their . . . corrupting each other, but as it affords leisure for that reflection, which . . . will sooner or later force itself on the most hardened mind (Observations, 152). Hand in hand with the desire to use solitude and silence to produce reflective prisoners goes the argument that, therefore, prison punishments must be made private, hidden behind closed walls, a vision of detention that would ostensibly supplant the older tradition of making a public spectacle of corporal punishment. Even without the architectural strictures of Bentham' s panopticon, one can see the outlines of the supposed shift, discussed by Foucault, from an embodied subjectivity that can be rendered civil only through violence and the spectacle thereof, to the interiorized, sensible subject