“Advocates of incarceration . . . hoped that the penitentiary would rehabilitate its inmates. Whereas philosophers perceived a ceaseless state of war between chattel slaves and their masters, criminologists hoped to negotiate a peace treaty of sorts within the prison walls. Yet herein lurked a paradox: if the penitentiary’s internal regime resembled that of the plantation so closely that the two were often loosely equated, how could the prison possibly function to rehabilitate criminals?”
