ABSTRACT
The reformers who redesigned America’s prisons during the late eighteenth century rewrote the book on crime and the criminal, as well. The penitentiary idea derives much of its logic from Enlightenment science, but the actual institution is no older than the American nation. Social behaviors have been transposed onto a physiological grid, their values determined and naturalized by the laws of science. By representing the criminal as a diseased subject, for example, reformers could control the diagnosis and the cure, while legitimating their discourse with the rational authority of medical science. The rational authority of science over bodies, spaces, and knowledge is asserted at Walnut Street, but challenged in Brown’s fiction. Benjamin Rush views on crime and punishment are representative of the late eighteenth-century prison reform movement; in fact, he was that movement’s most prominent and prolific spokesperson.
