As Hirsch has observed, both institutions deployed similar forms of punishment, and prison regulations were, in fact, very similar to the Slave Codes—the laws that deprived enslaved human beings of virtually all rights. Moreover, both prisoners and slaves were considered to have pronounced proclivities to crime. People sentenced to the penitentiary in the North, white and black alike, were popularly represented as having a strong kinship to enslaved black people.17 The ideologies governing slavery and those governing punishment were profoundly linked during the earliest period of U.S. history.
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