Reviewed by Roger Lane | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2

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Reviewed by Roger Lane | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Roger Lane, Haverford College

Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy: Liberty and Power in the Early American Republic. By Mark E. Kann. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 347 pages. $50.00 (cloth).

Mark E. Kann's Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy deals with the efforts of reformers, in an era stretching from the American Revolution through the 1830s, to revolutionize the response to crime by substituting terms in prison, later penitentiaries, for the largely corporal punishments of the colonial era. Part 1, "Punishment," aims to describe "the relationship between liberty and punishment in early modern liberal theory" (18); part 2, "Prisons," more specifically follows the first generation of American reformers, such as Benjamin Rush and Edward Livingston, sketching the results of their work in practice; and part 3, "Patriarchy," is devoted to "efforts to conceal patriarchal punishments from public observation ... and extend the reach of patriarchal power beyond the prison system" (18) to places such as juvenile houses of refuge and Magdalen societies. The introduction spells out three things that the book is not, despite their rough correspondence with the tripartite division described previously: it is not a philosophical history of punishment, nor a social history of penitentiaries, nor "a feminist analysis of 'penality'" (18). What is harder to see, obscured by a truly maddening amount of unnecessary verbiage, is just what, then, this book is, or indeed, given the considerable scholarship on the subject, much of it recent, why it should be read.

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