Manufacturing Moral Reform: Images and Realities of a Nineteenth-Century American Prison

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Jackson-Retondo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
American Prison

Prison Crowding and the Evolution of Public Policy

1985 ◽  
Vol 478 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOAN MULLEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Budget Constraints ◽  
The Public ◽  
Minimum Standards ◽  
Eighth Amendment ◽  
The Future ◽  
American Prison

While crowding has been a persistent feature of the American prison since its invention in the nineteenth century, the last decade of crisis has brought more outspoken media investigations of prison conditions, higher levels of political and managerial turmoil, and a judiciary increasingly willing to bring the conditions of confinement under the scope of Eighth Amendment review. With the added incentive of severe budget constraints, liberals and conservatives alike now question whether this is any way to do business. Although crowding cannot be defined by quantitative measures alone, many institutions have far exceeded their limits of density according to minimum standards promulgated by the corrections profession. Some fall far below any reasonable standard of human decency. The results are costly, dangerous, and offensive to the public interest. Breaking the cycle of recurrent crisis requires considered efforts to address the decentralized, discretionary nature of sentence decision making and to link sentencing policies to the resources available to the corrections function. The demand to match policy with resources is simply a call for more rational policymaking. To ask for less is to allow the future of corrections to resemble its troubled past.

Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons:

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Rai Waits
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Built Form ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
New System

Prison construction was among the most important infrastructural changes brought about by British rule in nineteenth-century India. Informed by the extension of liberal political philosophy into the colony, the development of the British colonial prison introduced India to a radically new system of punishment based on long-term incarceration. Unlike prisons in Europe and the United States, where moral reform was cited as the primary objective of incarceration, prisons in colonial India focused on confinement as a way of separating and classifying criminal types in order to stabilize colonial categories of difference. In Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823–73, Mira Rai Waits explores nineteenth-century colonial jail plans from India's Bengal Presidency. Although colonial reformers eventually arrived at a model of prison architecture that resembled Euro-American precedents, the built form and functional arrangements of these places reflected a singularly colonial model of operation.

The Pardon and the Progenesis of Parole in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Strange
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Males And Females

Most histories of parole trace its roots to Australian and Irish precedents, overlooking the Prison Association of New York’s role in monitoring and assisting discharged prisoners, both males and females. This chapter explains how a philanthropic organization established in the mid-1840s promoted the reformatory ideal and the notion that the discharge of prisoners must be earned through moral reform. Its executive members, among the leading penal theorists of the nineteenth century, became the foremost critics of the pardon power as a personal mode of discretion in need of replacement by a court of review, bound by strict rules. Their campaign to do away with the gubernatorial prerogative faltered by the 1860s, but the Prison Association successfully sowed the seeds for the flowering of indeterminate sentencing and state parole in the Progressive Era.

scholarly journals “In Darkest England and the Way Out”

1984 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Social Characteristics ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Wage Labour

In the past decade a prominent theme in the historiography of nineteenth-century Britain has been the imposition of middle-class habits and attitudes upon the populace by means of new or re-invigorated mechanisms of “social control”. To the apparatus of law enforcement and to the disciplines of the factory and wage labour, historians have added the less overt instruments of social welfare, education, religion, leisure and moral reform. Philanthropists, educators, clergymen and moralizers have all become soldiers in a campaign to uproot the “anti-social” characteristics of the poor and to cement the hegemony of the elite.

scholarly journals Protestants, the Liberal State, and the Practice of Politics: Revisiting R.J. Fleming and the 1890s Toronto Streetcar Controversy

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-129
Author(s):  
Marguerite Van Die
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Religious Issue ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Attention To Detail

Through the lens of R. J. Fleming, Irish Methodist businessman, alderman, and four times mayor of Toronto in the 1890s, this paper re-examines the moral reform campaigns of middle-class Protestants described by Christopher Armstrong and H. V. Nelles in their now classic study, The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company (1977). Instead of looking at the Sunday car issue from the perspective of the promoters and as evidence of secularization, it presents as a case study Fleming’s conflicted and controversial role as an evangelical politician confronted with a divisive moral and religious issue within the late nineteenth-century liberal state. Scholarly debates on the process of secularization in late nineteenth-century Canada have given little attention to the influence of the timing and nature of the country’s political arrangements and have thus neglected the contradictions and tensions devout politicians faced within the new state and social order. This paper argues the need to make an important but often overlooked distinction between political and social secularization. With close attention to detail, it examines Fleming as an “evangelical modernizer” who as a politician had to maintain the neutrality of the state and at the same time address the concerns of a religious constituency that feared a favourable vote on Sunday cars would lead to social secularization.

CHRISTIAN HEROES, PROVIDENCE, AND PATRIOTISM IN WARTIME BRITAIN, 1793–1815

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
GARETH ATKINS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThe use by British crowds of victorious admirals to articulate patriotic and libertarian ideas during the wars of the long eighteenth century is well known. But conflict also posed awkward questions about masculinity and issues surrounding it. Was military prowess compatible with politeness, with religiosity? During the 1790s, the fight to the death with revolutionary France made such questions hard to ignore, being compounded by the fact that Britain's most celebrated leader – Nelson – was not a paragon of virtue. This article shows how evangelicals sought to resolve these tensions by advancing a different set of ideals founded on piety and professionalism: by finding heroes of their own. This has crucial consequences for our understanding of how they and the ideas they championed became so prominent in late Hanoverian public life. In contradistinction to recent work suggesting that they exploited causes that were already popular – moral reform, antislavery – this article shows how they advanced a powerful providential narrative in which Christian heroes and godly policy were what made Britain great, a narrative whose veracity was ‘proven’ by wartime successes, especially in the navy, and which would remain highly influential well into the nineteenth century.

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