With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (review)

With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America. By Scott Christianson (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1998) 394 pp. $35.00.

The subtitle of this book is no exaggeration. Christianson begins in 1492, with Christopher Columbus, who sailed to the New World with at least four convicts and returned to Spain with six kidnapped Indians. He ends in our own time, when prisons house a larger percentage of our population than the prisons of any other country in the free world, and when the idea that prisoners can be reformed in prison is as unfamiliar as it was in 1492.

Between beginning and end are pages on the international trade in captive indentured servants and military conscripts in the seventeenth century; prisoners in Puritan New England; the Atlantic slave trade; resistance to prisons and the prison trade in the eighteenth century; British soldiers in American prisons and American soldiers in British prisons, including British prison ships, during the American Revolution; slavery and abolitionism; the origins of the penitentiary; the emergence of the model state prisons; imprisonment for debt; Indian removal; prisons camps and prisoners during the Civil War; medical experiments on prisoners in the late nineteenth century; political prisoners between Reconstruction and World War II; prisons, prisoners, prison uprisings, and the booming business of prisons in the late twentieth century; and much more.

Christianson, a former investigative reporter and currently the director of the New York Capital Punishment Documentary project, is familiar with the theoretical and analytical literature in history and sociology. But he is not interested in criticizing or enlarging it. With Liberty for Some is a work of wide-ranging historical reporting that seeks to explore 500 years of a paradox: How is it that "a country that prides itself as being the citadel of individual liberty . . . imprisons more persons per capita than any other nation in the world with the possible exception of Russia" (ix)? When he looks across the land today, Christianson sees a huge and growing system of "totalitarian institutions" (x). He turned to history to find out how that system came to be.

The book's greatest contribution is its range and inclusiveness. We do not often get a good view of both the institutions of imprisonment and the prisoners' experience of imprisonment in one volume. Nor are we often asked to think about slavery, indentured servitude, Indian removal, prison camps during war, political prisoners, and the imprisonment of convicted thieves, rapists, and murderers as different dimensions of the same historical problem.

Unfortunately, the book reads more like a polished draft of an encyclopedia of oppression than a carefully and completely wrought survey or synthesis of imprisonment. Too often, Christianson takes up an important topic, explores it for a few pages, and then drops it, moving onto another one. In a history of 500 years, he obviously cannot give all topics equal time. But specialists and scholars partial to interpretive studies are likely to conclude that the book desperately needs an analytical framework to hold the often disparate pieces together--and perhaps also to justify, from time to time, some of the book's more unusual juxtapositions of events, practices, and processes. Even those of us who think that a story well told can stand on its own--and offer interpretive riches all its own--will regret the absence, in many places, of illuminating transitions from one scene to the next.

The ideal audience for Christianson's book is high school students and undergraduates, for whom it may well be the spark that ignites 1,000 research papers and theses. Students and other generalists will be grateful for an outline of the history of imprisonment and more in 313 lively and provocative pages.

James Goodman
Rutgers Newark

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