At Religion Dispatches, Yale English professor Caleb Smith answers ten questions about his new book, The Prison and the American Imagination:
In our age of convict warehousing and scandalous war prisons, it can be hard to remember this, but from a certain point of view, the prison system began as an experiment in how convicts could be rehabilitated and redeemed by a disciplinary institution.
The reformers who built the model institutions of the early nineteenth century called them penitentiaries, to compel penitence. They drew from Christian traditions—Quaker tenets of nonviolence, Catholic and Calvinist varieties of asceticism and moral rigor—and they often represented the cell as a place of spiritual rebirth. As a precondition for that resurrection, they led convicts through mortifying processes including “civil death,” a loss of legal personhood with origins in European monasticism. The Philadelphia reformer Benjamin Rush quoted scripture in describing the rehabilitated convict as a man who “was lost and is found—was dead and is alive.” My book is animated by my fascination with this resurrection plot and all of its contradictions.
Continue reading at Religion Dispatches.