Professionalizing Prison: Primitive Professionalization and the Administrative Defense of Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829–1879

This article describes the process of “primitive professionalization”—the efforts of a small set of actors to claim professional status before their field has professionalized. Using a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1879), I examine the strategies by which one prison's administrators claimed status as professionals—those whose command of a specialized knowledge grants authority within their domain. Eastern's administrators deployed a series of evolving discursive strategies aimed at establishing themselves as professionals long before more formal, field-wide efforts to professionalize criminal justice. These strategies allowed Eastern's administrators to establish their professional status without traditional status markers of national networks, college degrees, or special training, which emerged later. Beyond illustrating a new pathway to professionalization, examining criminal justice professionalization at this early stage illuminates the early prison's precarious position and the internecine warfare among actors competing to control its meaning.

The Consequences of Prisoners' Micro-Resistance

For more than twenty years, scholars have called for greater attention to the consequences of micro-resistance to legality. Using archival data from Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1875), I examine the consequences of noncompliant prisoner behavior. I find that prisoners' noncompliance often entailed substantial costs to prisoners, particularly in comparison to the substantial benefits of complying with the prison regime. Despite its cost to prisoners, noncompliance did not have a single set of uniformly negative consequences for the prison regime. In fact, some forms of noncompliance may have actually protected the prison's reputation. Prison administrators, external allies, and critics used episodes of noncompliance for their own goals and to reinforce their preexisting claims about the propriety of competing prison designs, yielding this variable significance of noncompliance. As this study illustrates, connecting prisoner misconduct to power dynamics in the broader field produces a fuller understanding of micro-resistance's consequences.