“Separate confinement with mild punishments” was,
in several key ways, an
“enlightened” approach to
dealing with society’s internal
Intimate Enemy—the
criminal.
It sought to reform and rehabilitate the offender
so that he would be made whole and become a productive citizen and
worker.
Individual, personal and intimate conversion to Christianity
or
the practice of its virtues was the dynamic of the penitentiary
experience.
While there is no need to romanticize or
idealize this movement, its collapse was not followed by
a like penal theory or discipline that specifically complements the
broader democratic republican vision of the Founding Fathers and other
radical revolutionaries.
Rather, in what the PPS would judge an historic
and great spiritual fall, the penal system reverted and regressed to
the un-Enlightened and ineffective, quite brutal, penal practices
in place prior to the rise of the penitentiary theory.
Continue—Indian Removal movement
