Book Review

As its title indicates, Mark Colvin's Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs intends to further the dialogue between historical and sociological approaches to the history of American punishment by bringing theory into direct contact with historiography. Colvin contends that while historians, building upon the seminal works of the 1970s—Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Michael Ignatieff's A Just Measure of Pain, David J. Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum, and the collective work that appeared as Albion's Fatal Tree, have offered numerous (and often competing) studies of the rise of reformative incarceration, the peculiarities of criminal justice in the Slave South, the post-Civil War history of the chain gang and convict labor, the Progressive Era invention of parole, probation, and the juvenile court, and the transformation and decay of the prison, they have done so from within limited theoretical horizons. The result, Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs suggests, is that the history of punishment has developed as an empirically rich but conceptually untidy field of study.	1
Colvin's hope is to provide a new conceptual rigor to the historical study of nineteenth-century punishment. It is his aim not simply to offer a diagnosis of the present state of scholarship on nineteenth-century punishment but to move beyond it. As he puts it, "[t]his study continues the tradition of connecting penal systems to larger social and cultural forces and trends. What is new here, however, is the explicit application of competing explanations, rather than viewing the historical case studies through the lens of only one theoretical perspective" (4). It is Colvin's hope that such an approach not only will place the history of punishment on a firmer footing but also more effectively contextualize present penal conditions.	2
Colvin's work operates on two distinct, if interrelated, tracks. First, following David Garland's influential Punishment and Modern Society, Colvin identifies four different theoretical perspectives that he believes have shaped recent penal historiography. Like Garland, Colvin's analysis emphasizes the social theory of Emile Durkheim and his followers; the positions that Foucault put forth in Discipline and Punish; the analytical apparatus of Marxist theory; and scholarship that has sought to apply Norbert Elias's notion of a "civilizing process" to the history of penal practice. Colvin argues that each of these approaches offers valuable tools for understanding the history of punishment—but only if they are deployed in tandem to evaluate historically specific penal transformations. As a result, it is a central aim of Colvin's study not only to evaluate the relative usefulness of these approaches but to point to possibilities for their synthesis.	3
Colvin proposes to explore the explanatory usefulness of these perspectives through examination of three moments in nineteenth-century United States penal history. His analysis focuses on the emergence of the penitentiary in the antebellum northeast, the mid-century construction and expansion of female reformatories, and the late nineteenth-century Southern deployment of the chain gang. Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs proceeds in a lucid manner. Colvin offers three narratives of emergence organized around central concepts (in the case of the penitentiary, for example, around the intersection of the market revolution and religious transformation) followed by discussions of how the different theoretical approaches might explain or interpret the empirical material. Each of the book's sections, in other words, enacts the combination of historiographical reconstruction and theoretical reflection that Colvin wants to promote.	4
This is an ambitious effort, clearly developed and argued. Yet its very clarity and ambition reveals, I think, a series of problems haunting Colvin's project. For one thing, the actual nature of Colvin's "theories" is unclear. While it may be possible to argue that Durkheim or the Marxist tradition offers general theories of punishment or penal change, such a claim is much more arguable regarding Foucault and Elias. Both of the latter offered interpretations of specific historical processes (although possibly Elias's notion of "socio-genesis" might be more generalizable) rather than "theories" in the way that these function in sociological thinking. To be sure, there is nothing illegitimate about extracting principles from these interpretations and then using them for the task of generalization. But here the effect of such extraction is to freeze the work of historical thinking into static theoretical models. For example, Colvin argues that Durkheim's theory of punishment, "ignores social class and economic and political power in the shaping of ideological consensus" (11). But this puts Colvin in the position of having to declare that Kai Erickson (whose Wayward Puritans Colvin takes as an example of Durkheimian analysis) is "not a pure Durkheimian" because Erickson does consider the specific role of the clergy in creating deviance (11). Rather than evolving bodies of interpretation and knowledge, Colvin's four approaches emerge as Platonic forms to be related to his empirical studies from a position of exteriority. I, at least, was left unpersuaded that the different perspectives were as closed as Colvin argued. Indeed, their closed nature seems as much an artifact of his representation as an intrinsic characteristic of the approaches themselves.	5
An inverse problem troubles Colvin's historical reconstructions. Whereas his description of theories divorces them too much from empirical historical practice, his narratives do not acknowledge the theoretical reflection that shapes historiographical discussion. For example, Colvin organizes his description of the rise of the penitentiary around the notion of the Market Revolution. But the Market Revolution is no simple empirical fact. It is a theoretically complex concept and interpretation. These conceptual choices necessarily shape which of his perspectives seem to be most powerful explanations for the history that he offers. As a result, Colvin's attempt to apply different theoretical approaches to his historical data founders on the problem that his narratives are already theoretically preformed.	6
Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs emerged out of a pedagogical dilemma—the difficulty Colvin confronted in presenting the diverse array of historical and sociological studies on the history of punishment to his students in a coherent and manageable way (p. ix). Colvin has brought together an impressive amount of historiographical and sociological material in a search for that coherence. His work clarifies issues that need to be confronted if a compelling historical sociology of punishment is to be written. But such a historical sociology still awaits us.	7
Michael Meranze University of California, San Diego

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