Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
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of reformers. Judge Jacob Rush argued that pardons should never be granted in response to convict pleas of sorrow, guilt, or regret. Granting pardon to those who repented would “give license to men to break laws as they pleased,” while rendering the penal system and government weak, vulnerable, and ineffective.41 This view was widely adopted, as the percentage of pardons dropped dramatically in the early years of the nineteenth century. By 1807, only 11 percent of prisoners received pardons.
Debates over pardons never subsided. Occasionally they were granted on humanitarian grounds, such as the pregnancy of a woman, but otherwise were typically linked to evidence of reformation. The criteria for pardons were as follows: “The convicts who demean themselves best, and are most submissive to the rules and orders of the jail, are rewarded by a recommendation to the governor.”42 In 1820, Governor William Findlay refused to accept the Board’s recommendations and demanded more information in response to critics who claimed he pardoned too freely and was responsible for freeing a violent man.43 President of the Board of Inspectors Thomas Bradford, Jr., begged for the reinstatement of the pardon and continued to advocate the use of pardons as a tool of reform. As he explained in a letter to the governor, pardons were a key to making prisoners more orderly and hardworking: “The stimulus to industry and obedience was hope and hence pardons were frequent…. Hope of reward and fear of punishment in the cells were the powerful and efficient agents in maintaining the admirable discipline which then existed in the prisons.”44 Successive governors rejected the plea. Fewer than 6 percent of the women convicted in 1823 received such pardons.45 By 1830, the Board of Inspectors was begging the governor—then George Wolf—to reinstate the use of pardons on their recommendation. They devised a three-part classification system for determining an individual’s worthiness of pardon. The governor believed that too liberal a policy would disturb the peace of society and that the public deserved to know why a prisoner was pardoned.
Others felt racial and gender norms still figured largely into pardons and that the governor used his own subjective means to grant them. Both were true. Women could also earn a pardon by promising to resume dependency on their parents. Evidence of family ties could prove crucial in justifying a pardon and early release from prison. Artimissa Gardner was sentenced to three months in prison for running a disorderly house. She swore to visiting reformers not only that she was anxious “to pursue a virtuous course of life” but also that she wanted to return to her mother who lived near New York. PSAMPP inquired about the legitimacy of her claim, her own word not being enough, but the prospect of this outcome was always thought preferable to releasing a woman back to the streets.46 After Ann Setzimmous was imprisoned on charges of stealing fifty dollars from one person and something else from another, Inspectors had her released on the condition that she go home and live with her parents in the country.47 Young women resuming dependency on family were pardoned while older black men languished in prison. A group visiting Walnut Street Prison in 1827 commented on several older men of color who were unjustly held. The visitors hinted at a racist jury system that was only compounded by a pardoning system corrupted by money and connections.48
Isolation from Family
In its founding constitution, PSAMPP invoked the unification of the family of mankind as a central goal of their efforts, stating “By the aids of humanity, their undue and illegal sufferings may be prevented; the links, which should bind the whole family of mankind together under all circumstances, be preserved unbroken.”49 It was widely agreed by men of state and reform that a breakdown in domestic authority led to crime and mischief in the first place. Patriarchal authority had many faces and forms.50 Male heads of household, benevolent social reformers, and agents of the state would all exert control over the lives of poor women and men in different ways.51 When intimate patriarchy failed, they were happy to step in. Denied the opportunity to live with and labor on behalf of their own families, prisoners were forced to work as servants in a different house—the penitentiary.52 This grave violation of the family occurred simultaneously with the production of the nuclear family as “the family” in broader circles.53 Rather than being taught how to cultivate social relationships and familial relationships with their own kin, prisoners were forced to live in a distorted prison family organized around an overly simplified heterosexual political economy. Punishment stood against marriage and family, suggesting that the path of reformative incarceration was never really meant to lead to citizenship at all.
Penal authority was a double-edged sword when it came to women and marriage. On the one hand, unmarried women were disproportionately punished. On the other hand, penal authority also worked against the marriages of prisoners. The introduction of the penitentiary as the premier punishment actually undermined marriage. Women were cut off from the familial sphere and subject to an ever-expansive institutional patriarchy disguised by the rubric of humanitarian sensibility.54 This violation of the family by progressive elites in the name of humanitarian reform shows what little regard they had for the family ties of the immigrant and African American poor who filled the jails. The denial of family life for prisoners further distinguished them from the middling and elite whites who embraced marriage as a foundational relationship for the nation. Divorced from the central social relationship rooted in sexual difference—marriage—prisoners were both literally and ideologically blocked from participating in citizenship.
When Rush laid out his critique of public punishment, he also outlined his vision for what should take its place: imprisonment and complete separation from one’s family and community. His logic was that because liberty was so valued, imprisonment would be greatly feared. Rush wrote, “Personal liberty is so dear to all men, that the loss of it, for an indefinite time, is a punishment so severe, that death has often been preferred to it.” He envisioned complete removal from society to a remote location engineered to be difficult to reach and ominous to behold. Rush stated, “Let the avenue to the house be rendered difficult and gloomy by mountains or morasses.”55 For such a forward thinking man of the Scottish Enlightenment, this description sounds oddly medieval, reminiscent of the kind of dungeons and castles that were scattered across Europe. It was also the opposite of new ideas in circulation about the sublime effects of nature and natural beauty on the mind and soul.56
Popular depictions of the pain inflicted on families by punishment feature heterosexual couples shattered by the imprisonment of the husband. A 1796 poem portrayed the experience of imprisonment through the eyes of the woman left behind: “Say, does a wife, to want consign’d, / While weeping babes surround her bed, / Peep through, and see the fetters bind / Those hands, that earn’d their daily bread?”57 The poem centers on a nuclear family thrown into a state of sadness and want at the loss of their provider. Other portrayals focused less on finances and more on love. One poem captures the intense severity of isolation for a man denied his love. This prisoner exclaims, “My days were dull, my nights were long! My evening dreams, My morning schemes Were how to break that cruel chain, And, Jenny, be with you again.”58 The message in these stories was loud and clear: prison destroyed families. Prison inspired sadness, longing, worry, frustration, loneliness, anger, boredom, guilt, and poverty. These depictions celebrated families that were destroyed by the imprisonment of a man. But rather than lying around crying, as popular anecdotes portrayed, women had to take care of business. When her husband was imprisoned, Abigail McAlpines reported “[I] work in att my [ne]dedel which I hope will maintain me and my little girl decently,” not only during his imprisonment but even after his release when he went off to sea to earn some money for the family.59 The reality of family economies, particularly for those of the lower sort who disproportionately filled Philadelphia’s prison, was always more complex than the situation idealized by the reform agenda.
Punishment defined by Rush centered on the manipulation of the emotions of prisoners while protecting the emotions of innocent citizens. Imprisonment would impose a range of overwhelming feelings of loss, loneliness, sadness, and remorse on the guilty. Inmates would be forced to submit to the authority of the state, which had total control over their release. The imagined future reunion with loved ones—anticipation, relief, and joy—was just as important to Rush as the temporary exile from family and society. Rush explained, “By preserving this passion alive, we furnish a principle, which,