History of Penology: Bentham, Prisons, and Reform

Introduction: Bentham and the Origins of Modern Penology

For all intents and purposes, the modern history of penology — the science and theory of imprisonment and the state apparatus of the penitentiary — begins with the late eighteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In Bentham's day, corresponding roughly to the time of the American and French Revolutions, there was no idea of a penitentiary as such. There was instead His Majesty's Penal Colony of New South Wales — present-day Australia — where the equivalent of a modern misdemeanor offense, such as shoplifting, was sufficient to earn an unlucky Irishman a one-way ticket to Botany Bay, where convicts labored under military supervision (Morris and Rothman 1998, 246).

Bentham was the founder of the philosophical school of Utilitarianism, which attempted to approach and codify ethics in the same way that his contemporary Adam Smith codified the theory of market economics. Utilitarianism held that social good was measured by utility, or usefulness, and that the only philosophic goal in government was to maximize that utility and provide the greatest good for the greatest number. To some extent, Bentham was concerned with the contemporary British justice system under George III, which still operated under what Michel Foucault termed "monarchical law" (Foucault 130). The revolutions in America and France had increased domestic unrest, and an abortive French-funded uprising in Ireland was due in part to the unpopularity of a law enforcement system that disproportionately sentenced the Irish either to death or to penal transportation to Australia.

The Australian colony represented an older tradition of providing prisoners with punitive labor. To be sentenced to hard labor under the British justice system was generally to be sentenced to "picking oakum," as it was proverbially known. "Oakum" was a substance used by the British navy to stop leaks, made by tearing individual fibers from old rope and applying tar to them. Although a necessity for the navy, its production was also a punishment for infractions of military code — and it eventually became standard policy for those sentenced in civilian magistracy courts to criminal offenses (Foucault 1977, 139).

The famous example of Oscar Wilde illustrates just how physically severe this regime was. The Irish writer was sentenced to hard labor at Reading Gaol a century after Bentham's time. His two-year sentence for "gross indecency" — that is, homosexuality — was apparently so physically grueling that it left him permanently broken in health, all the more shocking when one considers that Wilde was no frail or effeminate poet but a man over six feet tall who had been a prize-winning boxer as an undergraduate. "Picking oakum" may sound like a mild military chore, but two years of it would not leave a man physically crippled the way two years of peeling potatoes would not (Morris and Rothman 1998, 135–6).

Punishment Before the Penitentiary

To the Utilitarian school of thought, there had to be a more useful thing to do with the imprisoned population. Standards of decency were shifting constantly with regard to crime and punishment in British and other Western societies. The England of Bentham's day treated capital punishment as a public entertainment: hangings at Tyburn were commemorated with pamphlets describing the horrible crimes of the condemned, and crowds of men, women, and children would attend to hear the "hanging speech," or last words of the condemned man. Yet this same society considered itself morally advanced for having done away with earlier Elizabethan-era punishments such as brandings, mutilation (having one's "ears cropped"), and castration (Morris and Rothman 1998, 31–2).

The issue of crime and punishment thus presented the Utilitarians with interesting and fertile ground for speculation (Morris and Rothman 108–9). The challenge was to replace both the brutality of corporal and capital punishment and the sheer wastefulness of punitive hard labor with something that served a genuine social purpose — a challenge that would lead Bentham to his most celebrated idea.

The Panopticon and America's First Prisons

Bentham proposed what he termed "the panopticon." Rather than housing prisoners in a common area — like a contemporary downtown jail's drunk tank — prisoners would be housed in separate cells radiating outward from a central, elevated guard post. The sense of constant surveillance would compel the prisoner to examine his own actions as though always observed, conditioning him into law-abiding behavior, not unlike the operation of a Skinner box for training pigeons (Foucault 1977, 200–2).

The first penitentiary in the United States is Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, which is still standing, now as a museum. The original facility, built in 1829, remained operational long enough to house the notorious Chicago gangster Al Capone in the 1930s and did not close until 1971. If Bentham provided the blueprint, Eastern State Penitentiary represented an attempt to engineer certain aspects of the panopticon's theory (Morris and Rothman 1998, 107). Yet where British systems of penal labor had grown out of a military context, American prisons grew out of a religious and eleemosynary one. America's comparatively recent independence from Britain at the time Eastern State was constructed meant that no large-scale state bureaucracy of any kind existed, and the task fell largely to religious and charitable organizations.

Eastern State therefore replaced the Benthamite emphasis on social correction with a religious motivation: prisoners would be placed in separate cells not to facilitate the intrusive observation of the panopticon but to stand the prisoner alone before the eyes of God, so to speak. The Society of Friends — the Quakers — who constituted the religious majority among governmental figures in Philadelphia at this time endorsed the Benthamite model but without its centralization, and thus the modern penitentiary was born (Morris and Rothman 1998, 298–9). Bentham's proposed surveillance towers nonetheless survive in the exercise yards and outdoor facilities of prisons to this day.

The next major leap in prison construction and design occurred in New York State at Ossining — the famous Sing-Sing. Sing-Sing became operational at roughly the same period as Eastern State but represented New York's differing model for corrections: it turned a profit. There was therefore no concern over taxpayer support for prisoners, as they essentially paid their own way (Morris and Rothman 1998, 165).

Works Cited

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? Berkeley: Open Media, 2003.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Random House, 1977.

Morris, Norval, and David J. Rothman. The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

"PA Judges Accused of Jailing Kids for Cash." Associated Press, February 11, 2009. Accessed February 26, 2011.