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, in time, may become an overmatch for those vicious habits, which separated criminals from their friends, and from society.”60 This desire for reunion gets stronger with age, burning inside the prisoner, and driving him or her to want to change. Rush wrote, “I already hear the inhabitants of our villages and townships counting the years that shall complete the reformation of one of their citizens.”61 He argued against banishment on the grounds that permanent exile destroyed the motivation of reunion with one’s family.
Rush sought to make the case that prison was a more severe punishment than either public labor or death. He argued that imprisonment was the most severe punishment precisely because it forced separation from family. Rush wrote, “An attachment to kindred and society is one of the strongest feelings in the human heart. A separation from them, therefore, has ever been considered as one of the severest punishments that can be inflicted upon man.”62 Rush’s proposal for this approach to punishment echoed sentiments expressed in an abolitionist essay about the problem of slavery: “When we consider the cruel invasion of every right of humanity, in forcing the unhappy Africans from their native land, and all those tender connections which rational beings hold dear.”63 Though Rush and his contemporaries would deny that their prized institution reproduced that one increasingly reviled, the parallels between enslavement and imprisonment are obvious.
Cutting people off from family and friends may have seemed an ingenious punishment to Rush and his contemporaries, but for African Americans both free and enslaved, it had a deep, dark, historic resonance. Ripping people from home, family networks, and loved ones was a routine practice of enslavement.64 The violence of such destruction and isolation was justified under an economic system that privileged slaveholder profits and whims over the kinship networks, family, and emotional needs of African Americans.65 As the institution of slavery was gradually eroding in the North, the institution of the penitentiary was being devised and rapidly expanded. Just ten years after passage of the Gradual Abolition Act paved the way for the end of slavery, the state of Pennsylvania enacted a revised penal law that allowed for containment not only of African Americans, but also of immigrants and the poor. Along with freedom came a new legal and social apparatus to deny freedom.66 Such seeming contradictions were ubiquitous. For example, Rush himself joined the antislavery society while remaining in possession of his own slave for many years.67 Rush, like so many other elites, justified this with the belief that blacks did not value freedom as much as whites. Only then could the connection between slavery and punishment be an afterthought. Prison was an ideal punishment if one presumed that liberty was “a good that belongs to all in the same way.”68 Ideologies of racism and liberalism became intertwined, enabling the expansion of an institution rooted in slavery during the era of slavery’s abolition.69
Forced labor was also a familiar economic and social relationship for the many presently and formerly indentured servants who populated the prison in large numbers. By sentencing convicts to “servitude,” the state reappropriated a classification long used to describe desperately poor people who were isolated from their own families while working in the homes of others, often under contract.70 While servants labored under an economic debt determined by the terms of their indenture, prisoners labored under a social one that placed an individual’s obligation to the state ahead of his or her obligation to their family.71 Rush did not comment on how closely his proposed scheme for punishment resembled slavery or indentured servitude. No one did. But while indentured servitude was becoming irrelevant due to changing economic realities, debates over slavery raged nationally.
At least one person thought separating people from their families was too harsh a punishment. On his visit to Philadelphia, abolitionist Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville detailed the pain of this separation: “By imprisonment, you snatch a man from his wife, his children, his friends; you deprive him of their succor and consolation; you plunge him into grief and mortification; you cut him off from all those connections which render his existence of any importance.”72 But for Rush, this pain was necessary to compel the personal transformation he hoped punishment would effect. Only then would the power of the family reunion be realized. Rush wrote of the hypothetical inmate’s family, “I behold them running to meet him on the day of his deliverance.—His friends and family bathe his cheeks with tears of joy; and the universal shout of the neighborhood is, ‘This our brother was lost and is found—was dead, and is alive.’ ”73 Themes of sin, atonement, and redemption reminiscent of the parable of the prodigal son resonate in Rush’s plan. For Rush, each inmate had the potential to be a prodigal son, able to see the error of his ways, repent, and be reborn under the right conditions.
