Stairway to Redemption: America’s Encounter with the British Prison Treadmill

Abstract

Stairway to Redemption: America’s Encounter with the British Prison Treadmill DAVID H. SHAYT The special question on the treadmill is that of labor in general, so grave for several countries of Europe and pre­ senting no difficulty to the United States. In that country the treadmill would be conducive to no good whatever. On the contrary, as production is yet in the United States below the wants of consumption, it is the interest of society to increase production, and to teach the prisoners a useful art. . . In the fall of 1822, where 26th Street met the East River in New York City, sixteen men could be seen balanced atop a barrel-like contraption that was laid on its side with a shaft running through it. The men were rotating the barrel with their feet like some great log in a millpond. A bell rang out each time the barrel made a complete rotation. The men were prisoners at the city penitentiary, and this was their punishment.2 The prisoner-powered treadmill was a highly successful British creation, but the attempt to introduce it to the United States quickly proved futile. Failure, however, does not diminish the significance of such a device to an understanding of the industrial history of both nations. First, as with any rejection of an imported technology, the story sheds light on the complex processes of adaptation. Rejection exposes aspects of a society’s self-image that otherwise can remain obscure. Morever, the different directions taken by British and American industrialization often have been reflected in the systems Mr. Shayt is with the Division of Community Life at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. He expresses thanks to all whose special insight and assistance with critical source material helped make the thoroughness of this study possible. 'Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in America and Its Application in France, trans. Francis Lieber (Philadelphia, 1833; repr., Cham­ paign, Ill., 1964), pp. 202-3, n. 20. ‘‘Commercial Advertiser 25 (October 15, 1822): 2.© 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3004-0007$01.00 908 America’s Encounter with the British Prison Treadmill 909 adopted (and not adopted) to punish common prisoners, a view set forth more precisely by two German social scientists some fifty years ago: “Every system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relationships.”3 In their attempts to modernize methods of punishment, prison officials, reformers, and legislators in both Britain and America once pondered ways of combining new penal philosophies with new forms of prison architecture and new technologies to produce right behavior among convicts? But what ultimately appeared suitable in one na­ tional context did not necessarily appear the same way in another. A case in point is the prison treadmill. British Background The death penalty and transportation (forced emigration) stood as two pillars of the preindustrial British response to unlawful behavior. Abandoned buildings and ships (or “hulks”) frequently were used for short-term confinement and for those awaiting sentencing.5 For even minor infractions, the liberal use of capital punishment and banish­ ment to distant colonies reflected both popular and official attitudes toward the prompt removal from society of unwanted or unworthy elements. The alternative concept of imprisonment as a civic duty to lawbreakers, with their eventual rehabilitation as the goal, arrived only with considerable agitation by religious activists and institutional reformers in the late 18th century and early 19th. In either form of imprisonment, the introduction of labor-making technologies was a logical course of action, meshing well with other prevailing attitudes toward the moral and economic values of hard work. Idleness, especially among prison populations, was considered by many as a sin against God and a crime against the common good.6 With the passage of the Penitentiary Act or Hard Labour Bill of 1779, the perception of prisoners as a potent source of manual labor was royally sanctioned by a general call for organized work as a means ’Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York, 1939), p. 5. ’Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison...