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  • Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War by Angela M. Zombek
  • Caroline Wood Newhall
Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War. Angela M. Zombek. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-60635-355-4. 312 pp., cloth, $45.00.

Angela Zombek's Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on Civil War POWs and prisons. Recent works use Civil War prison historiography as a means to better understand the very souls of the Union and Confederacy, as well as the United States. (See recent works authored and edited by Roger Pickenpaugh, Benjamin G. Cloyd, and Michael P. Gray.) Zombek adds to this body by attempting to understand how these societies treated their imprisoned citizens and enemies before, during, and after the war. Her book demonstrates the continuity of incarceration practices over time, focusing more on antebellum precedents and wartime practicalities than on postbellum bitterness. The author thus successfully argues that the Civil War was far from an aberration in the history of American imprisonment but rather a continuation of conflicting processes and values.

The book is organized into eight succinct chapters. Zombek focuses on five penitentiaries and six military prisons in geographically diverse "loci of power": Washington, DC; Ohio; Virginia; Georgia; and North Carolina (xvi). She reckons with the influences of the Pennsylvania and Auburn penitentiary systems across the United States, avoiding northeastern prisons because other scholars have examined them in depth. She effectively merges her primary sources with secondary sources on northeastern prisons to demonstrate ideological and practical continuities across time and space throughout the [End Page 414] antebellum and the Civil War. There is, however, some resulting confusion regarding distinct regional and temporal differences between the prisons examined.

What changed during the Civil War was not prison conditions, ideologies, or behaviors but rather that the massive wartime scale of incarceration encountered already familiar problems of overcrowding and poor conditions (151). Zombek points to blurred lines in the United States regarding criminality and incarceration that led to wartime "difficulty of classifying and separating inmates" as civil and military prisoners, a persistent issue during the war that exacerbated tensions between the belligerents (xvii). Her discussion of the overlap between military and penitentiary disciplinary practices effectively anchors her arguments. She pushes back against scholarly framing of POWs' experiences as "torture" or abnormally brutal to demonstrate that both military and penitentiary hierarchies, punishments, and populations relied upon corporal punishment (such as hangings, whippings, and public humiliation) in the antebellum. (See also W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018].) Army punishments proved to be "the bedrock of the penitentiary program, and courts-martial often sentenced military offenders to penitentiaries" (14). When POWs were whipped, forced to labor, and neglected by their keepers, none of this treatment was unprecedented, rare, or illegal in the United States; what changed was the "broadened demographics" of imprisoned populations during the Civil War (70). Middle- and upper-class men were largely unfamiliar with restrictions on their individual freedom, so wartime imprisonment was a severe shock to many who only knew about penitentiaries in theory. As this carefully argued book demonstrates, however, prison conditions in the antebellum closely reflected conditions during the war, for "prison officials confronted the same problems that plagued carceral institutions throughout the century: allegations of brutality, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and hardened inmates." (203)

Zombek delves into the human effects of nineteenth-century incarceration to understand the Civil War's crisis of imprisonment in a broader context and to set the stage for the postwar period. She delves into the interiors of penitentiaries and military prisons to better understand, "from the inside out," the lives of prisoners "most of whom comprised the lower classes during the antebellum and the war (54). Neither incarceration nor punishment rendered inmates silent. Using concepts drawn from scholarship on slavery, the author asserts that both subtle and overt "opportunities for interaction … abounded" between inmates through communication (such as tapping spoons against prison cell walls) and cooperation (134). She shows that it is not enough to...

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