eager to expand on the almshouse-style institutional labor regimes and transform prisoners into a disciplined workforce. British reformers provided Pennsylvanians with the idea of building self-sustaining, lucrative manufacturing systems inside of prisons. Just months after Benjamin Rush delivered his lecture against public punishment at Benjamin Franklin’s house, many in attendance became charter members of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. PSAMPP members exchanged frequent letters with their British counterparts about prison labor and published a pamphlet full of anecdotes from British prisons.109 PSAMPP sought to assure the public of the value and effectiveness of prison-based manufactories by citing the general order achieved in British prisons by this system. A manufactory of a Norfolk, England, prison specialized in cutting logwood and working with hemp to turn it into a usable material. The beating, heckling, and spinning of hemp was very dirty and smelly—and quickly adopted in Walnut Street Prison shortly thereafter. Who better to do the most distasteful tasks than prisoners?
While the impetus and support for introducing labor in prison came from British reformers, it was also rooted in the distinctly American impulse to develop a manufactory system that could free it from dependence on British imports. Advocates for manufacturing claimed the longterm financial viability of a sovereign state hinged on an increase in production.110 One commentator asserted that manufacturing was key to the wealth and future of the nation, claiming, “A nation composed of farmers, without a due intermixture of manufacturers and mechanics, must, sooner or latter, degenerate to the condition of mere labourers.”111 Manufacturing innovations were featured in local magazines and newspapers. In rural Pennsylvania, the spinning wheel was touted as a “fashionable piece of family furniture.”112 Some believed the popularity of spinning, along with the establishment of looms, cultivation of flax, and efforts to increase the quantity of wool would enable the United States to become independent. Artisans and manufacturers regularly complained about the waste of the nation’s wealth on the purchase of imported goods that were either unnecessary or could just as easily be produced in the colonies.113 As textile manufacturing grew, it played an increasingly important role in expanding Pennsylvania’s involvement in the Atlantic trade.114 Groups of manufacturers, merchants, and capitalists came together to promote their views in organizations such as the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and the Useful Arts, formed in 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
