Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
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1787—the same year as PSAMPP.115 The two groups had much in common, including expanding the productive capacity of the nation and putting convicts, vagrants, runaways, and immigrants to work. Arguments for putting the idle, poor, and criminal classes to work were circular. For those living outside the law, hard work would provide the discipline and structure they needed to allow for the reordering of their minds. For poor people, labor would keep them from a state of idleness, which was thought to lead to lawlessness. Idleness, then, was the greatest source of chaos and evil; it moved a poor person to a life of crime and stood in the way of a convict’s reformation.
The development of a penal system with labor at its core was intimately linked to this larger economic and political culture. Pennsylvania was the first state to embrace this connection when it passed An Act to Reform the Penal Laws of this State in 1790. The act required that the offender “undergo a servitude of any term or time” up to ten years while being “kept at such labor and fed and clothed.”116 With this directive, the modern penitentiary was made. This new system of punishment was put to the test at Walnut Street Jail, officially renamed Walnut Street Prison in 1790 with the passage of this law. The key distinctions would be forced labor behind closed doors and a newly authorized Board of Inspectors to oversee operations and management. Walnut Street Prison served as the nation’s first penitentiary and the destination for all those convicted and sentenced to one year or more in prison from across the state of Pennsylvania.
The Board of Inspectors quickly declared three goals for the new system: public security, reformation, and humane treatment of prisoners.117 An explicit concern with the treatment and well being of prisoners reflected an entirely new attitude toward those condemned. The belief that those convicted of serious offenses against society should be attended to rather than cast away seemed a radical departure from early modern corporal punishment.118 But this proposed humane treatment quickly became rigidly inhumane, defined by the strict ordering, regulation, and manipulation of bodies. The Board aspired to instill order in ways large and small; first, they restricted interaction with outsiders, prohibited drinking, and separated men and women. That part was easy and served to support the chief aim of punishment: the promotion of “habits of industry” through “solitude, low diet, and hard labor.”119 Labor was still at the heart of punishment, but to what end? The widely documented aims of penal labor—to punish, to generate revenue, and to reform—could easily be at odds with each other.120
Judges, prison guards, and reformers debated the real aim of prison labor. Was work intended to make the penitentiary self-sufficient, contribute to industry, or reform the inmates? Benjamin Rush and other visionaries believed that successful manufactories would signal successful punishment, defined by the transformation of convicts into productive liberal subjects. Rush insisted punishment should combine hard labor with bodily pain, solitude, watchfulness, silence, cleanliness, and a simple diet, and that these conditions would encourage individual transformation.121 Inspectors quickly departed from a literal interpretation of the law that called for labor “of the hardest and most servile kind” when they recognized that the most profitable labor was often not the most servile.122 When profit motives and reform motives contradicted each other, there was no clear consensus as to which was more highly prized. Hard labor in prison seemed like an ideal remedy for a range of social and economic ills. It would serve as punishment for those who refused or were unable to live and work in the ways that elites had hoped. Elites had very specific expectations for how the poor and working classes should live their lives: work hard, avoid the streets at night, attend church, and be honest, respectful, modest, and submissive.123 Those who failed or refused any one of these things were more likely to end up in prison, a place that was now thought to be capable of providing proper discipline to transform them into productive workers.
The work of inmates was grouped and managed first according to sexual difference.124 Authorities were generally ambivalent about women inside early American prisons. They did not make special rules for them but informally modified the policies as they saw fit.125 Women were grouped all together by sex. Men were also grouped together by sex but then further divided by the type of work they performed. When the Board put Francis Higgins in charge of overseeing the labor in prison, they asked him to keep a record of the work of each group, listing “women convicts” as a group and then detailing the work of men as “shoemakers, woolcarders, weavers, carpenters, logwood chippers.”126 While women were put to work doing tasks that were considered unskilled but which they presumably already knew how to do, men were offered the opportunity to learn a trade in the prison workhouse that they could then use to “maintain themselves and become useful members of society.”127 Inspectors boasted, for instance, of the large number of apprentices who worked in the shoemaking division. Male prisoners were offered the opportunity to earn wages from their labor to cover their costs, and then give the surplus to their families. The Inspectors reported paying the wife of an inmate from his wages “to assist her in her present embarrassments.”128 While men’s manufactories were unpredictable in their productivity, they did generate revenue, produce goods, and offer skill development to some inmates, some of the time.
Men’s work was divided into two major categories—one for ablebodied men and another for those men who were too old, weak, or infirm to do “men’s” work. Such a distinction created a class of prisoners who did not fit neatly into the prison labor system based on sexual difference. Too old or weak or infirm to work in the men’s manufactories, these men were assigned some of the same tasks as the women.129 This was an accepted fact of life: the declining physical abilities of men who lived very hard lives marked by poverty, movement, and manual labor. The creation of a second category of work for men who were unable to do men’s work revealed the temporality and fragility of the division along lines of sexual difference. It did not, however, open up opportunities for young, strong, robust, or skilled women who might take their place. The disruption of the gendered order of labor was a one-way street. Men could safely take up women’s work, but women, however capable or strong, were not permitted to do the work of men.
Valuation of women’s work was generally half that given to men’s, a signal of their inferior position in the labor market more generally.130 An early group of Inspectors valued the work of women cooks and washers at one shilling six pence. The male cook, designated “the first cook,” was allotted three shillings three pence.131 In 1809, the value of women’s work was set at twenty-five cents per day for those “Spinners, washers, and other able bodied whose employment is irregular.”132 The same report assesses thirty cents a day to “able bodied men whose employment is irregular.” The value of women’s work actually declined over time. In 1812, it was set at “no more than 20 cents per day.”133 By 1816, one week of work in prison earned women one-third to one-half of what men earned.134 Women’s work was also used as a justification for serving female prisoners smaller quantities of food than men. Because their tasks were “less laborious” than men’s, they received the “same quality” of mush, potatoes, and bread but in smaller portions than the men received.135 This distinction between the valuation of men and women’s work was made passively. The Board presented their resolution that the payment for women’s labor be lowered using passive voice. The report claimed that because “no particular price is fixed” to women’s work, it was worth less than work that had a fixed price; yet the Inspectors themselves made the decision not to assign it a specific value. Just as men’s wages were determined by the number of pairs of shoes produced or number of nails headed, women’s work could have been valued by the number of shifts made or yards of flax spun. But it was not so valued.
While the Inspectors refused to recognize the value of women’s labor, others following the debates over penal reform noticed that women in prison labored productively and diligently—even as men were causing chaos in the streets with wheelbarrows. An essay in the American Museum, possibly written by the publisher Mathew Carey, highlighted women’s institutional labor: “Hitherto the female criminals, condemned to labour, have been prudently placed in the work-house, where, it is said, their earnings have been equal to the cost of their food and clothes.”136 Women served as model prisoners and showed how the system of forced labor could be economically advantageous, while wheelbarrow