Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941

From the American Revolution to World War II the United States penal system underwent vast transformations, specifically in regards to prison-based punishment. Rebecca McLennan’s The Crisis of Imprisonment traces the evolution of the penal system and argues that a “long continuum of episodic instability, conflict, and political crisis has characterized prison-based punishment in the United States” (2). Despite taking on nearly two centuries of penal history, McLennan is successful in pinpointing significant changes that took place from the early republican period through the mid-twentieth century and engaging the reader throughout.

Her aim is to demonstrate the importance of the abolition of prison labor contracting as a watershed in American penal history—something she says few historians have emphasized. She is writing against those who have deemphasized contractual prison labor and its profitability. McLennan centers her narrative around four central themes: the centrality of productive labor, practical and formal reinvention, power in and around penal systems, and abolition of contractual prison labor leading to the modern penal system.

One of the themes I found most interesting was the negotiation of power between prisoners, guards, wardens, and legislators. As early as the 1790s (if not earlier), prisoners were defiant and insistent about their rights and by the twentieth century prisoners were actively involved on committees that allowed them to voice their concerns and make suggestions about prison improvements. Prisoners were very much active participants in shaping the penal system legislation and the nature of prison-based punishment. During the Gilded Age “convict rebellions helped reopen public debate over both the efficacy and the ethical value of the prevailing system of penal servitude” (149). Resistance in prisons—riots, strikes, etc.—often led to renewed debates in state and national legislatures about how to revamp the penal system to ensure the discipline of its inmates and the safety of all peoples involved in the system.

McLennan’s study is a great contribution to the historiography of American penal systems. Her central themes allow her to cover a wide-range of subject matter on the ins and outs of prison life and their relation to the world around them. I did wish that McLennan had drawn on more testimony from prisoners who were either witnessing the institutional changes, helping make these changes, or both. The reader gets a more thorough perspective of the administrative and legislative side of the penal institution instead of the prisoners themselves. To what extent were prisoners aware of their agency in affecting legislative change? If they were well aware, was this always the case or did an improvement in literacy lead to an increase in rebelliousness for improved conditions?  She does note that literacy contributed to an awareness of prison rights but not how it compared to the rebelliousness of previous eras. These are certainly questions that future historians of the American penal institution can pursue since, as McLennan makes clear, there are still many stones left unturned.