Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America by Jen Manion (review)

Living as we do in the era of mass incarceration, it is easy to forget that the prison—with all of its subsidiary institutions and support networks—has not always been central to criminal justice and the social order. But it is a lesson worth remembering. Jen Manion’s Liberty’s Prisoners powerfully recaptures the moment of transition between an older penal system based on public pain and shame and an emergent one centered on confinement, surveillance, and hidden humiliation. Focused on Philadelphia’s famous Walnut Street Prison, Liberty’s Prisoners demonstrates the human costs of the birth of the penitentiary.

The origin of the modern prison is, to be sure, a subject that has been addressed many times. At least since Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, scholars have traced and interpreted the emergence of reformative incarceration throughout the Atlantic world and beyond.¹ We can map out the spread and transformation of penal practices, identify the theories and ideologies that shaped them, and place them within the context of struggles for power and authority in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.² This extensive and rich body of scholarship makes it difficult to offer original insight on the transition. But Manion does exactly that. She both provides a powerful new accounting of the impact of the shift to reformative incarceration upon the everyday life of the poor and demonstrates the centrality of sex to the ordering of the new prisons.

At the heart of Liberty’s Prisoners is Manion’s remarkably sensitive and persuasive reading of the dockets of the Walnut Street Prison. As anyone who has worked with prison dockets knows, they are frustrating sources at best. Amenable, of course, to quantitative analysis, their cultural and social meanings are elusive. Yet Manion’s careful attention to the dockets’ language and form—their brief descriptions of inmates, their shorthand categories of crimes, their very organization—produces a fascinating accounting not only of who the prisoners were but also glimpses into their lives and the ways that the prison (and to a lesser extent the almshouse) disrupted their strategies for survival in the city. Moreover, she is able to reveal the racial and gendered assumptions of those in charge of the prison on a quotidian basis. Given that the majority of inmates at Walnut Street were there on charges of vagrancy, minor theft, or disorderly conduct, Manion’s insightful readings make clear that the early prison functioned more as a means to regulate the poor—especially poor women and African Americans—than to embody a more just and rational practice of justice.

One striking characteristic of the Walnut Street Prison was its porousness. Built originally in 1777 (with an additional block of solitary cells added later), the prison fronted Walnut Street across from the Pennsylvania State House. Unlike today’s massive and rurally located prisons, Walnut Street was not separated from the city in either imagination or practice. Indeed, the constant flow of people in and out of the prison meant that it could never be separated from the everyday life of the city. Manion deploys this flow to link the internal history of the prison to a set of ongoing points of conflict in early national Philadelphia: from the informal economy of the poor in the late eighteenth-century city, through the diffusion of class-based ideas of sentimental marriage and sexual relationships, on to elite fears of disruptive urban spaces in the nineteenth century, then the challenges faced by African Americans during Pennsylvania’s long emancipation, and finally to the issue of sexuality in the prison itself. These issues did not simply circulate around the prison, Manion demonstrates, but took shape in part through the prison.

In a review it is not possible to follow all the threads of Manion’s analysis. Instead let me focus on one—arguably the central—theme of Liberty’s Prisoners: sexuality and the...