Conclusion

PUNISHMENT OR REFORM?

Throughout the book, I have explored the historical evolution of a striking contradiction. From its earliest days, the modern penitentiary has been at cross purposes with itself: some of the first penitentiary promoters intended the new institution to be an alternative method of punishment—a more humane solution than torture or execution—while other voices suggested that the prison could also address the source of crime by transforming individuals. Could the new institutions simultaneously punish and reform? Prison officials and reformers pushed and pulled toward one objective or another throughout the nineteenth century, but evidence suggests that punishment and reformation were never successfully reconciled with each other. What is the purpose of imprisonment? This question continued to define a philosophical divide throughout the nineteenth century with the effect that various proponents and stakeholders defined success or failure on entirely different terms. How critics defined the failures and shortcomings of the penitentiary was largely dependent on their perspective on the purpose of the institution. Even when they agreed on the problem, reasoning about how the penitentiary should factor in responses to it were widely divergent. For example, in the penitentiary’s earliest years, it became obvious that prisons were not curtailing crime in a measurable way. For promoters who sought only a fixed measure of punishment, this was not a serious problem. It appeared logical that more crime demanded more prisons and more definite measures of punishment. In effect, as long as there was an ongoing sense of social crisis, the penitentiary could be called upon to provide an appropriate legal response. The penitentiary became a self-fulfilling and unimpeachable necessity in a society beset by constant social upheaval and change. From this perspective, there was seemingly no retreat from the penitentiary and no apparent alternative.

In contrast, humanitarian reformers decried the notion that the penitentiary served only to punish and promoted the potential of the prison to transform individuals. Born of evangelical impulses, the desire to reform individuals ran counter to a Lockean notion that punishment has inherent social value. For reformers, the importance of the criminal offence receded; rather, prison officials were to examine the offenders’ childhoods, social surroundings, and individual moral constitutions for answers to why the crime had occurred. Reformers sought better methods of transforming prisoners through more education, better religious outreach, and focused vocational training as opposed to brute physical labour. Punishment was to be replaced by moralization as penitentiaries were transformed into reformatories. Had this agenda been successful, it would have produced a different style of institution, but the moralization project was not realized in the nineteenth century. Not all stakeholders shared the reform vision. Prison officials, in particular, were reluctant to relinquish their powers of physical coercion or lessen the punitive effect of hard labour. Most damaging to the reform agenda was the fact that many officials never accepted the legitimacy of the value of individual reformation. Such doubts were easily supported and reform ideas weakened by the fact that in spite of new measures and programs designed for this purpose, crime rates remained largely unaffected.

Understanding these tensions is essential to the project of demonstrating why the penitentiary developed as it did and examining the source of its ideological contrasts. However, merely charting the course of this debate through history also provides an altogether unsatisfying conclusion, or rather a lack of conclusions. It is insufficient to consider the failures of the penitentiary only relative to how its promoters defined its goals. By this measure, far too much can be forgiven in an assessment of what the modern penitentiary created, its effect upon individuals, and its role in shaping Canadian society. If critics are content only to demand that the penitentiary fulfill its promises, whether these are defined as punishment or reform, then history is merely complicit in a much larger and devastating failure than is often acknowledged.

THE HUMAN COST

An important role for prison history is to redefine the terms of the above debate. This can happen through an approach that reorients our attention to new understandings of how the prison fails and asks who has paid the cost for these failures. Above all else, the penitentiary is an intensely social institution. While many historians have contributed greatly to integrating prisons into the fabric of social history, there is more to be done in recognizing the penitentiary as a social realm itself in which the experience and agency of individuals make history. Prison life is an intensely interpersonal experience based on multiple social relationships between keepers and prisoners. If we see keepers as only representatives of the state, or prisoners as a homogeneous body of “criminals,” then much of prison history is lost. We should not forget the importance of locating the agency and experiences of prisoners themselves. While the paucity of sources makes this an ongoing challenge, to abandon hope of recovering this history is to portray the prisoner as a faceless entity. It was this very anonymity that often perpetuated the misery of the penitentiary experience, and it should not be reproduced in historical research. Preventing this requires a willingness to look beyond the walls of the institutions to understand the interests, motivations, and backgrounds of prisoners as historical subjects. Penitentiary history can also encompass families, damaged domestic economies, the lives of the workers and unemployed who would become prisoners, and the struggles of the men and women who were once counted among prison populations. This is an ambitious project, but its outcome would provide a broader and more satisfying understanding of the larger importance of prison history. If prison history is to provide a better understanding of how the penitentiary affected individual lives and ultimately the larger social fabric, these new inquiries will necessarily look deeper.

One important issue arising from a focus on individual lives is the question of suffering. The penitentiary reoriented the social contract by establishing precise punishments to match criminal offences. This was an eminently capitalist idea that demanded time and labour power from the guilty party. However, from its earliest days, this new method of punishment also exacted a measure of physical or psychological suffering. This was an unspoken but generally acknowledged element of early penitentiary life, and humanitarian reformers staked their position on demanding a smaller quotient of suffering. However, even the most humanitarian voices seldom called for penal regimes that were free of the most common miseries. The penitentiary was never inimical to the idea of causing pain. While the reform movement often succeeded in diminishing the most brutal elements of penitentiary life, other indices of suffering remained untouched by reformers, and these too should be the subject of searching questions. If history focuses solely on the trajectory of reform ideas, these questions remain obscured.

Who suffered the most under nineteenth-century prison regimes? This question is not mere morbidity, for once it is probed with a focus on the lives of prisoners, it becomes clear that those subject to the worst suffering due to neglect, abuse, exploitation, and violence could also be counted among the weakest, most vulnerable, or marginal members of nineteenth-century society: women, children, racial and ethnic minorities, and the sick and disabled. They suffered in ways that the reform movement did not or could not address. If prison history is to discover the human cost paid by these prisoners, it must make strenuous efforts to appreciate that those who are the most vulnerable are also the most difficult to see in historical sources. But they are there: in basement cells, in sick beds, and in isolation wards. Some experienced neglect that made the penitentiary a physical nightmare. Others faced too much attention due to their vulnerability to predators, exploitive guards, or the hatred incited by racism. These individuals experienced the penitentiary in different ways than how we might commonly perceive the lot of the “convicted criminal.” Thus, when conservatives cite the eminent logic of “a just measure of pain” for every crime, we must forcefully reply with the questions, What additional misery were the just deserts of the prisoners we would count as the most vulnerable? Where is the justice in their suffering?

WHO IS A CRIMINAL?

A second approach to the individuals at the centre of prison history addresses questions about how they are understood in the penitentiary and in larger society. Just as the purpose of the penitentiary becomes naturalized, the prisoner as criminal carries an eminent and seductive logic. Criminality was a construction to which the penitentiary contributed, but without rigorous investigation of this process, such constructions can become invisible to us. This myopia often characterizes contemporary debates about prisons in which inmates occupy the position of the Other. Accepting such social divisions at face value causes gross distortions of how we see the historical effect of the modern penitentiary. Such distortions can also misdirect our focus. For example, much of the mistreatment and abuse that would cause us to recoil in the case of an individual becomes more normalized when it involves an unidentified and threatening body of “criminals.” Thus, it is more than mere discursive dalliance to investigate the construction of criminality that takes place in the penitentiary. It is essential to understanding how such a construction creates the divisions that sustain and reproduce its oppression.

If we accept at face value who is regarded as dangerous or unfit for society, we also lose the capacity to criticize the effects of such designations. In the realm of penitentiaries, this shroud creates the potential for abuse and tragedy. It was under the circumstances created by particular constructions of criminality that George Hewell was murdered in an isolation cell at Kingston in 1896. This crime was rendered justifiable not on the basis of exonerating evidence but by who and what the penitentiary portrayed this prisoner to be. Similar examples abound in contemporary society. The death of Robert Dziekański in 2007, in which four armed police officers overpowered and killed an unarmed traveller, invokes the Hewell incident with eerie precision. A second troubling reflection of this dynamic is the death of teenager Ashley Smith in a Canadian correctional facility in 2007. Guards watched passively on video monitors as Smith strangled herself to death in her cell. These fatal acts of excess and negligence by authorities were rendered justifiable by the construction of these individuals as a “safety threat” or “disorderly.” Such designations served to nullify both reason and caution with tragic consequences.

While historians have made inroads in understanding how race, class, and gender contributed to constructions of criminality, few have considered the specific role played by the penitentiary in forming these constructions. As the penitentiary became more sophisticated and engaged in early versions of a criminological science, its officers claimed expert knowledge about the criminal individual. Thus, an expert discourse arose within the penitentiary about which prisoners should be regarded as potentially violent or disruptive, which could be saved or reformed, and, as the twentieth century drew nearer, which might conceivably pose a threat to society once they were released. In spite of claims to specialized knowledge that allegedly made it possible to assess these qualities of character, however, the resulting distinctions often reflected, and thus sustained, the same structures of domination that underlay social divisions of race and class throughout Canadian society. Prison history can help us to identify the dynamics at work in the creation and reinforcement of broader social hierarchies, as well as to understand how constructions of criminality, in particular, were legitimated by new claims to professional criminological knowledge. Such an understanding is essential, given that the resulting categories did not exist solely in the realm of discourse and theory. Distinctions among types of prisoners played a significant role in the development of prison policy and therefore had an impact on how particular individuals experienced penitentiary life.

The effects of these constructions were also shaped by another central contradiction in the Canadian penitentiary. As David Garland argues, in spite of Victorian ambitions toward new criminological expertise and reform visions of evangelical reformations, the penitentiary in this era was often physically or materially incapable of delivering on such promises.¹ Nineteenth-century prisons were simply too bureaucratic and rigid to accommodate the individualist ambitions of reformers; they were designed specifically to treat every prisoner exactly alike. This shortcoming and the contradiction with reform ideas was just one of many particularities that characterized the Canadian penitentiary. In many senses, such realities demand that our attention to ideology and discourse be complemented by a renewed attention to economy, politics, and geography.

A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PUNISHMENT?

Canadian prison history has paid too little attention to the importance of political economy in understandings of the modern penitentiary. It is indisputable that the penitentiary rose in direct relationship to industrial capitalism. This is evident in many different manifestations, from the prison architecture that resembled industrial factories to the sale of prison labour that integrated prisons with capital markets. Most importantly, the first penitentiaries were constructed on a plan that would harness the bonded labour of the unemployed for economic profit. This basic fact has been sorely neglected in spite of the enormous economic, political, and ideological effects it had on the development of penitentiaries in North America. In efforts to explore the ideological transformation from pre-modern to modern times, the basic influence of capital has been obscured to the point of invisibility. This has had a tremendously distorting effect on how the penitentiary is interpreted and perceived in contemporary society. When history views the penitentiary only as the product of humanitarian impulses, it will ask the wrong questions. Historians should more readily recognize that in addition to solving a humanitarian dilemma about the legitimacy of legal punishment, the penitentiary proposed a solution to the problem of labour supply. This was particularly true of the Northern states, which were the first to adopt the penitentiary, but the same pattern was repeated in the South after the Civil War as former Confederate states confronted their own threatening labour force in the form of recently freed slaves. In Upper Canada, the Tory aristocracy followed the American lead, because they were impressed not by the humanitarian depth of feeling their representatives witnessed in the Unites States but by the potential for profit.

As Rebecca McLennan notes, the subsequent failure of contractual penal servitude in almost every modern penitentiary has caused historians to underestimate the importance of the original economic basis of the penitentiary as an influence throughout the nineteenth century. In Canada, this failure was nearly immediate, but the lasting effect of the capitalist ideology touched every element of the evolution of the penitentiary throughout the nineteenth century. If we do not acknowledge the importance of the economics, we are also likely to miss the legacy of capital’s early influence upon the penitentiary. In fact, it was folded into the penitentiary project in innumerable ways, affecting policy and ideology in ways that demand our attention. Although reformers did not acknowledge it, the capitalist foundations of the modern prison deeply affected the moral culture underpinning the reformation project, which was established on humanitarian and evangelical pretexts. They also played a deforming effect on constructions of criminality in which the unemployed were associated with the criminal underclass. In the reverse of this construction, the escape from criminality was premised on reintegration with the world of capital through productivity and self-sufficiency. As penitentiary medical records make clear, not all prisoners were up to this challenge. Finally, while few are prepared to admit that the prison sentence is little more than a unit of economic exchange, it is inescapable that the penitentiary evolved from the poorhouse and the debtors’ prisons. Early capitalist society found it justifiable to affix an economic cost to criminal transgression, and this legacy has shaped every element of the modern penitentiary.

It is important to recognize the Canadian penitentiary as a central component of both local and national histories. A more fully realized political economy of punishment can help push Canadian prison history in this direction. What becomes almost immediately apparent is the importance of locality and geography. Throughout the nineteenth century, the penitentiary was an intensely local and insular institution. In the pre-Confederation era, this was underscored by the obvious fact that Kingston Penitentiary was the only institution of its kind in Canada. However, even after the creation of a federal penitentiary system in the 1870s, each institution remained largely isolated from the others and from hands-on federal control. By the time five federal institutions were in place in the 1880s, each penitentiary was marked by distinctions that were often more important than the weak glue provided by a federalist system, supposedly cementing in place a national penitentiary order. Moreover, for many decades after Confederation, Kingston continued to be the only federal prison that resembled “the modern penitentiary” as it was conceived in the model American institutions of the Northeast. When it came to the other federal penitentiaries, isolation and localism played a much larger role than justice officials were prepared to admit. This was often manifested in the absolute dismantling of reform ideas due to necessity or expediency. Economically, each penitentiary could not stand on common ground due to the disparate nature of markets in each jurisdiction. While Kingston and St. Vincent de Paul struggled to achieve economic viability in Ontario and Québec, any hope of financial self-sufficiency was nonexistent in western Canada. Seeing this gives a clearer picture of the economic health of each institution, but it also helps to reveal an unacknowledged human element. Imprisonment at Kingston Penitentiary would have been a very different experience than incarceration in Manitoba or British Columbia. Given the isolation, the dearth of available labour, and the often brutal living conditions, one might argue that prisoners in the West paid a higher cost than those inside Kingston’s walls. There was nothing particularly modern about this discrepancy. For many decades, the federal penitentiary system laboured under the fallacy that it was maintaining a standard of punishment that was actually impossible. If historians can direct attention to the effects of these disparities, they will dispel the tendency to accept reform ideas at face value. It is a valuable reminder that many of the reform ideals of the modern penitentiary were mere lip service to an unattainable standard.

LOOKING THE PRISON IN THE EYE

In February 1969, Johnny Cash performed at San Quentin Prison outside of San Francisco. Cash’s flagging career had been revitalized a year earlier by a live recording made at Folsom Prison, and by the time he appeared at San Quentin with his wife, June Carter Cash, and his touring band, he was the most successful country star in the world. Nearly one thousand prisoners jammed into the San Quentin cafeteria to watch the performance, among them some of the most dangerous criminals in the California penal system. A guard warned Cash, “Don’t you dare look these men in the eyes. I’d suggest you and your family look just over their heads at the wall in the back of the room.”² The fear of unrest during Cash’s performance was underscored by a complement of one hundred guards armed with machine guns, some of them patrolling above the crowd on suspended catwalks.

Opening the show to thunderous applause, Cash ran through several of his hits before performing a song called San Quentin. He had written it the day before the show after visiting with some of the prisoners. It began,

San Quentin, you’ve been living hell to me.
You’ve blistered me since 1963
I’ve seen ’em come and go and I’ve seen ’em die
And long ago I stopped asking why.

The audience seemed shocked after the opening line, and then the men seized on the meaning of the verse and erupted in a startled exclamation. By the end of that verse, the audience realized exactly what Cash was singing about. After the first line of the second verse, “San Quentin, I hate every inch of you,” the audience exploded in joyful agreement. The short song ended with the verse:

San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell
May your walls fall and may I live to tell
May all the world forget you ever stood
And may all the world regret you did no good.
San Quentin, I hate every inch of you.

The men roared their approval, crying out, “One more time! One more time!” Cash obliged them and played it again. It is easy to see why the song was the emotional high point of an already highly charged performance. When Johnny Cash called San Quentin the hell hole that it was, it gave the prisoners some form of redemption. Cash was like a missionary from both heaven and hell, connecting with the prisoners in a way that no other performer could have achieved. The redemption Cash offered to the prisoners at San Quentin, bigger than any song, was that he was interested in connecting in such a way in the first place. Cash’s multiple visits to prisons throughout the 1960s demonstrated a political will to make a statement about prisons and their forgotten inmates. June Carter Cash recalled, “We had come to see the lost and lonely ones.”³ By playing for them and singing about them, Cash gave the prisoners at San Quentin a booming voice that was impossible without him.

The novelty of his interest in prisoners and the success of Johnny Cash at San Quentin was in part connected to wider social upheaval and unrest in which prison issues, for a short time, were pushed to the forefront of public consciousness. Cash’s first visit to San Quentin in 1958 had been a more cheerful affair. By 1969 the mood surrounding penitentiaries, as with the rest of American society, had darkened considerably. Much of this tension came to a head in the Attica Prison riot in September 1971 in which thirty-nine people were killed. The death of Black Panther George Jackson, author of Soledad Brother, in an uprising at San Quentin in 1971 further engaged the American revolutionary left. Jackson’s death sparked the rise of prison rights movements, calls for reform, decarceration, and the recognition of incarcerated criminals as political prisoners. Canada did not escape this tumultuous moment. A riot at Kingston Penitentiary in April 1971 lasted four days and left two prisoners dead. In France, Michel Foucault, already a respected chair at the Collège de France in Paris, became more deeply involved in the politics of prison reform. Following an uprising at the central prison in Tours, Foucault created the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (or GIP) in December 1971. GIP was interested in giving a voice to prisoners as a method of exposing the brutality of penitentiary systems in France. When Foucault announced the creation of GIP, he stated, “We propose to let people know what prisons are: who goes there, and how and why they go; what happens there; what the existence of prisoners is like, and also the existence of those providing surveillance; what the buildings, food and hygiene are like; how the inside rules, medical supervision and workshops function; how one gets out and what it is like in our society to be someone who does get out.”⁴ Although the GIP recorded some successes initially, the movement gradually gave way to its own revolutionary Prisoners Action Committee, who resented the involvement of “specialists in analysis” in the prisoners’ rights movement. Foucault disbanded the movement and turned his attention to the writing of Discipline and Punish.

What can we learn from individuals who took an activist position against the penitentiary? For a brief moment coming out of the 1960s, there was sustained interest in the apparent dysfunction of penitentiaries in Western society. Other academic historians, among them David Rothman and Michael Ignatieff, wrote revisionist histories in the 1970s that detailed the structural and ideological origins of punishment. Even though reaction to the explosive events of the 1960s suggested the possibilities of reform or an alternative, this potential ran headlong into an emerging era in which socially conservative movements came to dominate justice agendas and discussions about crime control. While it appears that the moment to seize upon change has passed, there is still value in the struggle. New research into prison history can successfully assume the task undertaken by Johnny Cash, Michel Foucault, George Jackson, Leonard Peltier, and countless others who questioned the penitentiary in real terms and refused to accept its oppressions as inevitable.