Book Review

Michael Meranze's book offers an incisive, provocative analysis of the development of penal reform in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States. Using Philadelphia as a case study, he shows how post-Revolutionary leaders sought to reform the mind, not merely punish the body, of criminals by incarcerating them in prisons and imposing a regime of solitary confinement and hard labor. Although other historians have explored this development, few provide the theoretical sophistication and richly detailed narrative found in Laboratories of Virtue. Meranze makes brilliant use of the work of Sigmund Freud, Jurgen Habermas, and especially Michel Foucault to view the rise of the penitentiary as part of an expanding disciplinary network in the early national period. Like Foucault, Meranze deconstructs penal reform and the middle-class liberal society that spawned it. He reveals the contradictions that characterized prison discipline and how reformers denied or obscured them. Ultimately Meranze's book offers a scathing assessment of American liberalism by unmasking the coercive and exploitive aspects of its disciplinary strategies.	1
Part One of Meranze's book entitled "Displayed" surveys the public corporal and capital punishments prevalent in late colonial Pennsylvania. The author discusses how such practices increasingly subverted rather than reaffirmed the established social order. They evoked sympathy for the criminal, whetted spectators' appetite for cruelty and violence, and repressed, but did not reform, deviant behavior. In the 1780s the Pennsylvania General Assembly instituted a system of public penal labor, one designed to reform the character of convicts and impress the citizenry with the horror of crime and the power of the state. Yet failure quickly overtook this experiment in punishment. The public's contact with criminals bred sympathy for them and forced Pennsylvania legislators to rethink their approach to punishment.	2
Meranze details how fears of "mimetic corruption," of law-abiding citizens imitating the criminals on public display, haunted late eighteenth-century reformers like Benjamin Rush. Such fears, persuasively argues Meranze, occurred in a context of concern over the corruption and destabilization of the new republic. Post-Revolutionary leaders targeted taverns, fairs, and theaters as sources of pollution. They also denounced the "trading justices," those magistrates motivated by lucrative court fees rather than a commitment to justice. Like convict laboring sites, the courtroom, the stage, the tavern, and the fair grounds became controversial arenas of public display, places that allegedly threatened the creation of a virtuous, disciplined society.	3
Meranze does an excellent job in showing how reformers redesigned many public sites and created new ones, like public parks and schools, to promote civic virtue in the early national period. It was in this context that penal reformers privatized punishment by establishing in 1829 the Eastern State Penitentiary where convicts were sequestered from public view. Meranze shows that this enterprise was a double-edged sword. Although in some respects it personified genuine humanitarianism, the penitentiary also subjected inmates to more invasive forms of discipline. Even as reformers decried public corporal punishments, they implemented disciplinary techniques like solitary confinement to transform the mind and soul of the convict. The spiritualization and privatization of punishment, then, were ultimately means to an end, the inculcation of total submission in prisoners.	4
The author shows that in the first two decades of the nineteenth century prisons like the Eastern State Penitentiary were part of an expanding disciplinary network, one applied to the poor on public relief, prostitutes, and unruly juveniles. Like Foucault, Meranze argues that the "swarming disciplines" extended their control over larger groups of people and institutions. Yet contradictions embedded in the very nature of this enterprise precluded its success. Reformers like Benjamin Rush paradoxically sought to transform convicts into model citizens by denying or suppressing the very qualities they would need to function in a republic. Convicts could not speak; they could not participate in the public sphere of discourse so crucial to the young republic. They were to practice absolute submission in the hopes of joining a society that stressed individual freedom and agency. Their removal and isolation from society ironically reinforced their pariah status and made it unlikely that they could ever rejoin that society.	5
Paradox also characterized the spiritualization of punishment. Meranze discusses how concern over the body increased rather than lessened under the new disciplinary regime. Reformers increasingly focused on the body in an effort to reform the convict's mind and soul. Echoing Foucault, Meranze argues that the body became an arena of disciplinary reformation, subject to ever-increasing rules and regulations. Ironically the removal of corporal punishment from public display helped to create a literature focused on the sufferings of the body. Laboratories of Virtue discusses numerous narratives which described the sufferings of convicts. Meranze does a particularly good job at delineating how Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn played with images of bodies confined, tormented, in private. The spectacle of the suffering body continued to haunt the public's imagination even as it was banished from public view.	6
Meranze is sensitive to the class and gender biases of penal reformers. He explores how they blamed an individual's lack of moral character, not structural inequities in the society, for crime and other social ills. He also discusses how reformers targeted women who deviated from prescribed gender roles. Like contemporary conservatives who denounce "welfare queens," early nineteenth-century reformers condemned unmarried mothers on poor relief and urged the reimposition of patriarchal authority on female-headed households.	7
Discussion of an 1834–1835 scandal in the Eastern State Penitentiary underscores how reformers' biases thwarted the success of penitentiaries. Warden Samuel Wood and his staff were accused of fiscal impropriety, cruelty towards prisoners, and adultery with Mrs. Robert Blundin, the wife of one of Wood's assistants. In the end Wood was exonerated, yet Mrs. Blundin's reputation remained tarnished. Although there was plenty of evidence of wrongdoing, Pennsylvania's political establishment rallied behind Wood and the strategies of discipline imposed in the penitentiary. Public opprobrium against Blundin illustrated reformers' fears about women exercising power outside of patriarchal control.	8
Callous disregard for prisoners also characterized penal reformers. Meranze illustrates this point by focusing on the 1833 punishment and death of Eastern State convict Mathias Maccumsey. The latter suffered convulsions and died while struggling against the iron gag, his punishment for talking to other prisoners. Penal reformers and Pennsylvania legislators defended the use of the gag and argued that Maccumsey precipitated his own death by struggling against it. Meranze concludes that the gag symbolized the penitentiary's system of discipline and the dehumanization of those subject to it. Use of the iron gag also underscored the continued use of corporal punishment in prisons. According to Meranze, the persistent resistance of convicts made such punishments inevitable. In the end, "prison officials had nowhere else to turn than to the body itself" (318).	9
Laboratories of Virtue is an impressive achievement. It is thoroughly researched, brilliantly argued, and lucidly written. My one minor criticism is that Meranze offers relatively little discussion of the architectural design and physical plant of the Eastern State Penitentiary. Unfortunately there are no illustrations showing what the prison looked like. This is a curious omission because Meranze stresses that reformers sought to impose a new kind of spatial control on prisoners. This quibble aside, however, Meranze's book is a major work of scholarship. Historians of punishment and reform must read this book. So too must those interested in exploring the fault lines hidden below the revolutionary experiment in liberal democracy.	10
Myra C. Glenn Elmira College

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