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

Imprisonment, Scott Christianson argues, has been a defining feature of American life since Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World with a crew composed largely of impressed sailors and until the present day, when federal, state, and local prisons and jails incarcerate almost two million people. To make this argument, Christianson defines “imprisonment” extremely broadly, including not only penal incarceration, but also slavery, indentured servitude, and captivity as prisoners of war. This very breadth represents Christianson’s most important innovation as well as one of this book’s main problems.

Christianson portrays imprisonment as a method of controlling labor, of regulating political and military opponents, and most importantly, as a mechanism for establishing and maintaining racial dominance. In particular, he portrays racial slavery as one form of imprisonment. The international slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated within the context of an equally-important international trade in indentured servants and in prisoners sentenced to “transportation” by English courts. Christianson suggests that there was little initial distinction among slaves, servants, and convicts, asserting that by 1650, most immigrants to the New World arrived as prisoners of one type or another (13). In North America, however, captivity acquired a racial dimension. While imprisonment constituted only “temporary restraint” for whites, it gradually escalated into “total control”—slavery—for blacks (53). Thus, Christianson reformulates the familiar concept that indentured servitude evolved into racial slavery by characterizing imprisonment as the central feature of this process. This argument also represents a significant departure from most other histories of prisons per se, which tend to indicate that imprisonment did not become common until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Race continued to be key to the subsequent history of incarceration. Following the abolition of slavery in the United States, Christianson suggests that prisons served as a substitute. Even though most northern states ended slavery by the early nineteenth century, the inequities in northern law and society created a prison population that was already disproportionately black. Likewise, when the southern states were forced to abandon slavery following the Civil War, they often enacted “Black Codes” designed to entrap newly-freed blacks in criminal violations. In addition, many states established systems of convict leasing whereby businesses could rent the labor of overwhelmingly black inmates, effectively recreating slavery on a smaller scale. While these conditions no longer exist, modern prisons continue to house blacks and other minorities in numbers vastly disproportionate to the general population. Moreover, Christianson suggests that modern prisons have an impact on black culture comparable to that of slavery—they separate families, destroy communities, and create antagonism between the prisoners and the larger society.

Unfortunately, Christianson’s provocative effort to reshape thinking about the history of imprisonment will not satisfy many historians. His book is most stimulating in its discussion of the colonial period and of very recent decades, the two eras least covered in other histories of the prison. It is weakest, however, in its treatment of prisons from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the period most thoroughly analyzed elsewhere. For example, Christianson emphasizes the brutal nature of prisons throughout American history, but he minimizes other key elements of the story: their tremendous expansion in scale and number in the early nineteenth century, the frequent waves of ideological reform followed by retrenchment in practice, and, more generally, changes and variations in prison operations. In this account, prisons all seem to be alike.

In addition, Christianson employs a narrative, rather than analytic, style of writing. Often, this strategy succeeds; the use of narrative contributes to some of the best aspects of the book. Christianson’s description, for example, of efforts by Tom Murton (superintendent of the Tucker prison farm in Arkansas) to reform his institution and the entire state prison system reveals many of the nuances involved in prison operations, including the need to satisfy many constituencies and the difficulty of achieving institutional change. On the other hand, Christianson’s...