The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941. By Rebecca M. McLennan. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv, 505 pp. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-521-83096-6. Paper, $24.99, ISBN 978-0-521-53783-4.)

Abstract

In this latest of several recent studies of American prison history, Rebecca M. McLennan, an associate professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, examines the brutal system of labor-based imprisonment that held sway in the United States from the Jacksonian era through the Gilded Age, until the mounting political crisis over its inherent contradictions and abuses in a free republic brought about what she calls “the abolition of penal servitude” in the Progressive Era. Drawing from a large body of previously published studies, government archival sources, and newspaper accounts, her work mainly focuses on a few New York state prisons, particularly Sing Sing, Auburn, and Clinton, with occasional comparisons to other prisons in the North and South. She focuses on New York because it was the birthplace of the “Auburn plan” of state imprisonment, it had the nation's largest prison system from the 1830s through the 1920s, and the state “remained on the vanguard of virtually every important development in the field of legal punishment in the industrial states” prior to 1940 (p. 12). McLennan's dense, heavily documented analysis echoes and builds on the main line of other scholars. She also provides details about convict resistance such as work stoppages and riots as well as a closer examination of some of the corruption scandals that plagued the supposedly model prison system. Future historians will gain many useful leads from her hefty megastudy that draws from more than a century of historiography on this important topic. She has managed to dig up basic background information about several influential historical figures, including Woody Ruffin, of the landmark prison discipline case of Ruffin v. Commonwealth (1871), whom she helpfully identifies as a “twenty-year-old former slave from Petersburg” (p. 116).