In Defense of Flogging Read Online Free PDF

new method of containment, New York was not far behind. Crime, as usual, was seen as a growing problem. One early New Yorker recounted a time when “no man would venture beyond Broadway towards the North [Hudson] River by night without carrying pistols, and the watchmen marched on their beats in couples; one to take care of the other.” So in 1797, well after the failures of Walnut Street should have been known, New York reformed its criminal code and appointed Thomas Eddy as the warden of the state’s first prison, Newgate Prison in Greenwich Village. Eddy, another Philadelphiaborn Quaker, was New York’s leading prison advocate at the time and slandered corporal punishment as a relic of “barbarous” British imperialism ill suited to “a new country, simple manners, and a popular form of government.”
    Newgate’s approach to solitary confinement, though still allegedly for the prisoner’s own benefit, was also clearly punishment. Politically, then as now, prisons started to gather support both from conservative hard-liners who demanded ever more severe sanctions and liberals who desired an alternative to punishment and desperately wanted to
believe reformers’ curative promises. Eddy offered religious and moral instruction in Newgate, and prisoners who behaved earned special privileges. Those who acted up were thrown into solitary confinement, where, according to Eddy, they could “perceive the wickedness and folly” and experience “the bitter pangs of remorse.”
    Newgate was overcrowded, dirty, and violent from the get-go. One lawyer for the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism observed that such confinement helped criminals “increase, diffuse, and extend the love of vice, and a knowledge of the arts and practices of criminality.” Some noted, as was perfectly obvious, that this new and supposedly curative system of incarceration was driving people insane. After at least four known riots in the first seven years, the city went so far as to organize armed watchmen to surround the prison at night to prevent prisoners from escaping. Then, after yet another serious riot, public disapproval finally forced Eddy out in 1804, seven years after Newgate’s opening.
    In truth, what happened at Newgate wasn’t unique; all prisons have failed. Newgate was just one of the first. But as happened in Pennsylvania in 1790 and New York in 1797, the establishment
of a penitentiary system usually went hand in hand with the abolition of corporal punishment. So despite—or perhaps because of—Newgate’s failures, New York authorized similar prisons but on a much larger scale. After all, with flogging banned, what was the alternative? New York built upstate Auburn Prison in 1816 and then upriver Sing Sing in 1826. After these new prisons opened, the state sold Newgate to the city of New York, which tore it down in 1828.
    What was notable about this second wave of construction (which also included Philadelphia’s 1829 Eastern State Penitentiary) was the prisons’ stone walls, the multifloored cell blocks, and the massive size we’ve come to associate with a place that looks like a prison. With these penitentiaries designed for hundreds rather than dozens of prisoners, the modern scale of mass incarceration, an American invention, began.
    The public was fascinated with these new institutions and their two competing systems, both of which promoted silence and promised to deliver America from the evils of punishment. New York’s Auburn went with a “congregate model” that let prisoners gather in groups for meals and work;
Philadelphia’s Eastern State, based on Bentham’s solitary ideals (though it lacked the Panopticon’s basic circular structure) enforced extreme solitary confinement. To maintain silence, guards wore slippers to muffle footsteps, and tracks carried food carts with leather-covered wheels. When not in the