With Liberty For Some:  500 Years Of Imprisonment In America, by Scott Christianson

For the most part, this is precisely the book I was looking for when I began doing research on the subject of the history of imprisonment in the United States (and other countries).  Although the history of prisons and the history of slavery are often viewed separate from each other, there are a few works that put the two subjects together and view them in a particular context.  For example, when we examine the gulag and archipelagos of Soviet Russia and Communist China, or talk about the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, it is impossible to avoid dealing with the combination of imprisonment and slavery as an aspect of social control in which a totalitarian regime sought to deal with enemies within.  Throughout its own entire history, the United States has been either the prison in which the empire of England (and then the United Kingdom) dealt with social control within, or a nation that has relied upon both slavery and imprisonment as a means of social control of a restive and potentially rebellious group of populations, most notably involving ethnic minorities as well as America’s criminal class and political agitators who remain internal enemies to this day.  This book deals thoughtfully with these connections.

At just over 300 pages of core material (and a lot of endnotes), this book is divided into eight large chapters that deal with both a great deal of detail about the connections between slavery and imprisonment and a whole host of other social concerns but that also look at the cosmic cope of such matters.  The author begins with a discussion of the prisoner trade (1) during the colonial period and the problems faced with imprisonment in England as well as the control of such people and their integration into colonial society, and the way that it was tied to indentured servitude and early slavery.  After that the author discusses the way that the colonial period showed American society to be growing into a land of prisoners and keepers, which it has remained (2).  There is a look at the prisoners of the revolution, whether Tory or Patriot, and how that influenced the creation of more prisons on American soil in times of war (3), and also the way that early Republican prisons sought to control prisoners in silence without completely breaking them in the big house (4).  The author turns to scandals and periodic efforts at reform (5), discusses the late 19th and early 20th century as the golden age of political prisoners (6), and discusses what it meant in the middle of the 20th century for people to do time (7).  Finally, the author comes full circle (8) and discusses the disproportionate effects of prison on different parts of the American population and discusses the enduring popularity of prisons for a variety of complex social causes.

What the reader is left with at the end is a very complex set of feelings about the entanglement that has resulted thanks to the history and course of slavery and imprisonment within the United States.  To a large degree, American social cohesion has always involved a great deal of hostility towards internal enemies–political enemies, minorities, criminal populations who prey on their neighbors–and that certainly remains true now.  The cost of prisons and their popularity in politically important rural parts of the country (as well as their profit to political and economic elites) makes it difficult for society to spend a great deal of money on other priorities like health and education.  Imprisonment encourages a fictitious belief in debts owed to society (rather than the obligations that institutions have towards us) and has greatly distorted family life and created a hardened criminal class which has lived in inhumane conditions and whose unpaid labor still provides profits to some while undercutting wages for others.  Yet even those of us who are hostile to prison as a method of social control are faced with the question of what we can do about it, when slavery and imprisonment and abortion and other forms of population control all point to larger and still existent social problems that we are loath to resolve, and sometimes even to admit.