Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War by Angela M. Zombek (review)

The imprisonment of more than 400,000 men and hundreds of women from both the Union and Confederacy has long inspired Civil War historians. These scholars have produced studies of individual prisons, wartime prison policy, collective memory, war trauma, and edited collections of prisoners’ writings. No one, however, has contextualized wartime prisons within the broader history of imprisonment in the United States. In her new book, Angela M. Zomek moves Civil War prison scholarship forward by situating the Civil War within this broader chronology. In so doing, she raises important questions about the war’s lasting impact on crime and punishment in the United States, even if Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons does not ultimately provide bold answers to those questions.

Zombek argues that Civil War prisons were not wartime anomalies. Instead, they fit patterns of incarceration that both predated and outlasted the conflict. Antebellum Americans modeled much of their prison policy on military discipline, and vice versa. This blurring of military and civil authority worried Americans who viewed crime and punishment as a local matter. In both peacetime and war, officials struggled to keep prisons from overflowing and to keep prisoners alive. They also questioned the purpose of prisons: were they supposed to punish criminals or reform them? Zombek maintains the Civil War “magnified” these debates and constituted an “extraordinary crisis” (x). The stigma of criminality imposed on citizens and soldiers was especially fraught, and it endured long after military prisons closed. In making her argument, Zombek examines newspapers, prison records, documents in the Official Records, and private manuscripts from five locations: Ohio; Washington, D.C.; Virginia; and Georgia—all places in which both state (or district) and military prisons were established before the Civil War—as well as North Carolina, which did not have a state penitentiary but opened a military prison in the summer of 1861.

The book unfolds chronologically, but its structure is largely thematic. Chapters move from theories of crime and punishment, to histories of local and state penitentiaries and military prisons, to prison administration, prisoners’ experiences, escape attempts, the incarceration of women, and the closing of wartime prisons. Each chapter considers the entire era, creating a rather dizzying narrative that conflates prewar and wartime issues. The structure also enables untidy answers to guiding questions. For instance, Zombek begins one paragraph in the first chapter claiming, “By 1860, many penitentiaries held soldiers convicted of crimes in addition to prisoners of war, raising the question of whether or not soldiers could be classified as criminals” (16). The same paragraph concludes, “By the 1850s, penitentiaries were custodial and their purpose was punishment, so military officials, not surprisingly, used them to detain prisoners of war” (17). Zombek is correct that antebellum penitentiaries housed criminal soldiers and civilians, but what prisoners of war did prisons hold in the 1850s? The press’s editorial process ought to have reconciled this issue before publication.

More broadly, the press ought to have encouraged and assisted the author in honing a clearer narrative structure. Although the book claims to explain an “extraordinary crisis,” the crisis is assumed rather than defined. Zombek suggests that taking war prisoners burdened existing infrastructure, and that the imprisonment of citizen-soldiers and suspicious persons exacerbated the stigma of criminality. In part, she is correct. But Union and Confederate military strategy and diplomacy—especially prisoner exchange—were significant factors that do not figure prominently in Zombek’s explanation. Scholars agree that during the first two years of the conflict, the Union and Confederacy captured thousands of enemy combatants and moved them through prisons based on an agreed-upon policy of prisoner exchange. That policy broke down by 1863 for numerous reasons, creating backlogs of prisoners who, though shuffled between multiple prisons, never left the system. For prisoners and their families, the movement between these prisons (or not) fueled...