Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
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. Rush’s brother, Judge Jacob Rush, concurred. For both Rush brothers, suffering was a crucial component of punishment. Judge Jacob Rush argued, “The voice of nature has uniformly demanded sufferings as the proper atonement of guilt, and that sorrow alone is not a sufficient expiation.”74 Only through suffering and repentance could one find salvation—and be worthy of readmittance to the polity.75
Because family was both so prized and so perilous, family would be denied those who violated the law. Family ties were already stretched for everyone by years of extended separations caused by war, politics, and economic necessity.76 The actual consequence of imprisonment for most families was financial peril. Laboring families required income from all their members, including adult men and women as well as older children. The imprisonment of either a man or a woman would result in a lost source of income for the family. If a prisoner was the single or primary earner in his or her family, this would be devastating. The famous bigamist, kidnapper, and counterfeiter Ann Carson described herself as the primary earner in her family, and the chaos her imprisonment triggered. She reported, “My family were, by my confinement, thrown into a state bordering on distraction; ever accustomed to have me at the head of both business and household, they knew not how to proceed without my presence.”77 Carson was one of many who served as the anchor of both home and work for a family. No one disputes the fact that Carson was a successful businesswoman who ran a small shop dealing in fine china and other imports. She was one of a sizable number of women in Philadelphia who managed their own businesses and asserted their economic independence in the process. Women like Carson exhibited a great degree of innovation, autonomy, and success while navigating the economic and social constraints of the city. Her family’s hardship was a real and tangible consequence of her imprisonment.
Carson was not exactly a typical prisoner—her crimes were more serious, diverse, and publicized than those of most women. She probably earned more money as well. But she was part of a large group of women whose personal and family economies were thrown into chaos by imprisonment. Women imprisoned without trial for minor social transgressions under the vagrancy act faced incredible challenges.78 Who would run Elizabeth Ferguson’s beerhouse while she sat in prison for thirty-six hours on charges of intoxication? How much income did Mary Williams lose when she was held with five other women on charges of running a disorderly house? Did Mary Brown, a free black widow who labored as a washerwoman, lose clients when she was locked up for socializing with friends and deemed a “riotous” disturber of the peace?79 Constables, night watchmen, clerks, and judges did not trouble themselves with these questions—though they freely complained of the consequences when women were unable to support themselves.
Imprisonment could destroy a woman’s ability to earn money, keep a job, and raise her children. Institutional policies regarding children ranged from indifference to strict superintendence. Either could be devastating to mother, child, and their relationship. Some women moved between the almshouse and the prison, reflecting a cycle of poverty and imprisonment with no clear way out. Other women were devastated to learn that their children were bound out when they were in prison. In colonial times, infants and very young children could accompany their mothers to jail. This practice persisted in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.80 Women with very young infants or who actually gave birth in prison were allowed to keep them by their side. In 1787, Catherine Usoons pleaded for some relief from prison or labor or both, in part because she was working “with my young infant at my breast.”81 The Visiting Committee reported that “some females” furnished “a gift” of clothing for a child recently born in the prison in 1800.82 Inspectors John Harrison and John Bacon noted on April 28, 1817, that a prisoner Dobly Miller gave birth