ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the prison and the campaign for its reform from the birth of the penitentiary in Pennsylvania through the eve of the Civil War, as the prison became the cornerstone around which the modern criminal justice system was constructed. It examines the historical and conceptual interconnections between the institution of imprisonment and that of capital punishment, whose campaign for abolition – like the movement for Temperance – was intimately connected to prison reform. The chapter then turns to debates over prison discipline in antebellum America that played out in the popular press, giving special attention to representations of "The Prison" and responses to its reform in the North American Review. Finally, it focuses on a new category of the citizen-subject, the "discharged convict", and discusses it that emerges in two little-known periodicals dedicated to America's culture of incarceration at mid-century.
