This is a 10-minute teaser of my full conversation with Professor Ashely Rubin, released as this month's bonus episode. Subscribe here for £3 ($3.85) to listen to the full conversation and all monthly bonus episodes.
How were women treated in prison in America in the early years at a time before they were considered citizens? Why has Alcatraz prison left such a legacy? And why is America's prison system the way it is, when their early plans were to move away from a penal system that brutalises to a more reformative system? Professor Ashley Rubin studies the history of prisons in America and answers these questions for us.
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[Music] Hello and welcome to another episode of Evolving Prisons with me, Keagan Kari. This is a 10-minute teaser of my conversation with Professor Ashley Rubin, which is this month's bonus episode to listen to the full conversations lined up to monthly bonus episodes of Evolving Prisons for only three pam per month by hitting the link in the show months. Professor Rubin studies the history of prisons in America from their origin to today. She tells us how women were treated in prisons in the early years at a time before they were considered citizens. We talk about the evolution of capital punishments, why Alcatraz prison has left such a legacy, and we discuss why America suffers from mass incarceration despite their early plans to move away from the way British prisons brutalised to a more reformative prison system. I hope you enjoy this conversation. [Music] So Ashley, I'm really excited to hear about the history of prisons in America because they are one of the main countries we think of when we think about prisons around the world. So tell me, when did prisons first begin in America and why were they created separately to jails? Okay, great. So the first thing before I even answer that question is I just want to explain what I mean by prison because prison is one of those words that people kind of use interchangeably with jails and in colonial America, as in England at the time, a prison was oftentimes what we would now see as a county jail. So you could say, like, well, we've had prisons for always, but that's not really accurate because what we had as prisons back then isn't really what we think of as prisons today. So I define prisons as places of punishment, specifically punishment for people who are convicted, usually of serious crimes, so they have to be convicted first and then this is their punishment. And usually for a long period of time, and oftentimes this is done by a kind of state or national authority rather than a local level authority. So jails, by contrast, tend to be places of short-term confinement, not necessarily as punishment, sometimes for punishment, but also for people waiting trial, who are in the process of being tried, who are maybe awaiting their punishment, some cases they're being held over because they still owe fees and fines, and they tend to be in more local-level facilities and, let's say, so I forget these. So it's a short-term conviction. People who are not necessarily criminals, people who have not been convicted of crimes, necessarily, so those are the kind of big distinctions between jails and prisons. So that distinction basically emerged at the end of the 18th century. So basically the American Revolution is happening and kind of at the start of that, but definitely after the American Revolution is done. So we're getting to the 1780s now. That's really where you start to see people trying to establish new facilities. The first is basically reform jails, but eventually as what they called state prisons. And these were basically the first modern prisons that we would recognize as prisons stay, where they're just for people convicted of crime, just as places of punishment for long-term confinement. And so that distinction basically emerges. The very first prison is 1785, and then the second is 1790, and the third is 1794. So that's when it happened. Wow, and after the Revolution, I read that Americans wanted to move away from how British prisons were because it was quite brutal. And I found that really interesting because when I think of a brutal prison system, you know, sometimes I think of America, but they wanted to be all about reforming people. So at that time, what were they creating to get away from Britain and to become more reformative? Yeah, there's so many ironies when you compare the early prisons in the United States to prisons in the United States today. So part of this has to do with the American Revolution. So prisons were a very kind of patriotic institution, and there was a lot of kind of using the patriotism and the atmosphere, this kind of anti-British sentiment to generate these prisons, which is extra ironic because actually the prisons basically were originally based on a blueprint designed by the British Reformer, John Howard, who in turn was kind of extrapolating on some other designs from other British folks. So it's kind of weird. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance going on because on the one hand, they're like, John Howard, what's this great humanitarian? And we're doing exactly what he designed in his book. But at the same time, there was also the sentiment of our criminal justice system as a British imposition. So what was the criminal justice system at the time? The biggest, not necessarily the most numerous, but the kind of biggest focal point of the criminal justice system was capital punishment followed by corporal punishment. So mostly we had hangings by this point, and then in terms of corporal punishment, it would be things like branding on the thumb or in the hand or on the cheek to signify that this person has been convicted of a crime. So letting people know, but also as a punishment and as a stigma that the person would experience. Whipping was another one spending time in the kind of public square in a pillery or in the stocks, which are those wooden devices where your arms are out next to your head. Your head is usually like in a wooden block and either your feet are also in a wooden block or you're just standing. So either you're kind of like forced to be sitting or you're forced to be standing. Those would be the most common kinds of corporal punishments at the time. And over the course of the 18th century, a little bit before then, people were starting to be uncomfortable with these punishments and thought that they were inhumane and just unseemly. And especially there was a growing concern about capital punishment and especially because at the time, kind of everything was a capital offense. So today, murder and treason are go to capital punishment, sorry, capital crimes. But at the time, everything from serious larceny to robbery to burglary to arson, those are all serious crimes, but those would also be capital offenses. And so the more kind of low-level offense or especially for first-time offenders, young offenders, there was kind of this sense of a mismatch between the punishment and the crime or the kind of problem of the offender. And we also kind of had a shift in kind of how we thought about crime. Is it something that's inborn, you're just bad? Or can you actually change? And if it's possible that you can change, well, maybe killing somebody or giving them this really life-destroying punishment of corporal punishment is not the best thing to do. So for various reasons, and there are actually other reasons, but those are kind of like the most common, increasingly public opinion was shifting away, or at least elite opinion, I should say, not all public opinion, but elite opinion was shifting away from capital punishment and corporal punishment. And then at the same time, there was also kind of another, somewhat overlapping group of penal reformers who were paying attention to the local jails, these county, what they call county prisons. And these were true both in England and in what became the United States. These were massively overcrowded. They were disease-infested. They were disgusting like they smelled. If you would go into one and come out, your clothes would rake of the stench being in that jail. The inmates were not just people who were accused criminals. It also included vagrants and also debtors. And a lot of times the family members of debtors of even criminals, as well as witnesses awaiting trial in some cases. So it was a big mix of people in this cesspool. That was also very dangerous. So you'd have people kind of praying on each other. If a new person entered the jail, there was this kind of rite of passage where people would make them strip. And then they would sell those clothes because jails were also extremely porous at the time. So you could basically like there would be vendors like next to the jail, where people in the jail would try to sell things. In some cases to the jailer, but also to people kind of coming by, because the jails were in the center of the town. And so people would steal the clothes off of a new person. And at the time, jails didn't provide you with clothing. They also, they charged for room and board. So you'd have to pay for your stay. And so all this stuff was seen as very unseemly. And jailers were also seen as very corrupt individuals who would be selling, especially grom, alcohol to the inmates. And so it was just seen as this horrible situation. And then John Howard, whom I mentioned, wrote up his experiences. So he was an aristocrat. And by virtue of his title, he basically was sheriff of his, what's called a county, his jurisdiction. And so his job was to maintain the jail. And most aristocrats didn't really take that job seriously, but he did. And he went into the jail and was just absolutely astounded. And so he started doing research on jails, going around and visiting others to see is anyone doing this right. And he compiled all these stories of situations where my favorite one is the black ass eyes, where a good chunk of the town died. Because people were brought in from the jail into the courthouse. And everybody who was at the courthouse died because the disease spread from the people who had been in the jail, disease infested jail. And they came in for their trial. And the disease spread to everybody in the courthouse, including like the judges or, well, judge or judges, I forget it, which, and then it kind of spread to other people. And so something like 300 people died because of the spread of, I think it was jail fever type is basically. And so there's kind of like this general sense of, yeah, jails are dangerous. And this growing recognition of they're also dangerous to society, of like people who aren't criminals or aren't being tried, like judges can be killed from just exposure. And so he kind of laid out a blueprint for how to reform jails. And so this other group of American reformers were looking to his model and looking at their local jails. And they're going in and bringing in soup and food and kind of visiting with the people in jail. And then mobbing to kind of avoid these bad outcomes. And so those two reform movements, the kind of anti-capital and corporal punishment and the jail reform movement kind of merged into trying to replace capital and corporal punishment with prison. And that was kind of the early days among some of the reformers. But once the prison kind of got established, then it spread to other places where people weren't so interested in replacing capital punishment. So they kept capital punishment. In some cases, they restricted it somewhat, but not as extensively as some of their kind of early adopters. And then the prison just kind of spread across the United States. And then from the United States, this new model can spread around the world. This was a teaser of the Phil conversation I had with Professor Ashley Rubin, which has been released as this month's bonus episode. Tell us into the Phil conversation. Subscribe to monthly bonus episodes for only £3 per month by clicking the link in the show notes. [BLANK_AUDIO]
