Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media Series)

by Angela Y. Davis

Likewise, Bender’s analysis of the relationship between the novel and the penitentiary emphasizes the extent to which the philosophical underpinnings of the prison reformer’s campaigns echoed the materialism and utilitarianism of the English Enlightenment. The campaign to reform the prisons was a project to impose order, classification, cleanliness, good work habits, and self-consciousness. He argues that people detained within the old prisons were not severely restricted—they sometimes even enjoyed the freedom to move in and out of the prison. They were not compelled to work and, depending on their own resources, could eat and drink as they wished. Even sex was sometimes available, as prostitutes were sometimes allowed temporary entrance into the prisons. Howard and other reformers called for the imposition of rigid rules that would “enforce solitude and penitence, cleanliness and work.”60 “The new penitentiaries,” according to Bender, “supplanting both the old prisons and houses of correction, explicitly reached toward . . . three goals: maintenance of order within a largely urban labor force, salvation of the soul, and rationalization of personality.”61 He argues that this is precisely what was narratively accomplished by the novel. It ordered and classified social life, it represented individuals as conscious of their surroundings and as self-aware and self-fashioning. Bender thus sees a kinship between two major developments of the eighteenth century—the rise of the n...