In Defense of Flogging Read Online Free PDF Page B

cells (coming or leaving prison, for instance), inmates’ heads were covered in hoods. The goal, prison commissioners said, was to keep prisoners so isolated that if they were in prison on election night, they wouldn’t know who was president of the United States when they were released. Eastern State even followed Bentham’s advice on the delicate subject of “carrying off the result of necessary evacuations.” He was not talking about fire drills. Because a common “necessary” room would be dangerous to security and incompatible with solitude, Bentham reluctantly advocated, despite the cost, “having in each cell a fixed provision made for this purpose.” Eastern State installed individual flush toilets before even the White House had indoor plumbing.
    Then, in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. We sometimes forget that the purpose of what became de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in
America was America’s new penitentiary system; everything else was lagniappe. The two Frenchmen toured prisons and penitentiaries in this young and still exotic nation. But it is as if Beaumont and de Tocqueville were unwilling to criticize their hosts. They express fondness for nearly everything prisonrelated except prisoner idleness and one New Orleans jail they describe as “a horrid sink, in which they are thronged together, and which is fit only for those dirty animals found here together with the prisoners.”
    Their strangely fawning take on Auburn and Eastern State Prison is curious in its contradictions. They somewhat nonsensically claim that Philadelphia’s Eastern State “produces more honest men” while Auburn “more obedient citizens.” In Auburn Prison, “where they are whipped, they die less frequently than in Philadelphia, where, for humanity’s sake, they are put in a solitary and sombre cell.” This didn’t seem to bother them. Nor did the fact that despite Philadelphia’s supposed noncorporal “humanity,” prisoners there were “much more unhappy.” In the end they pick Philadelphia’s Eastern State as best but quickly note that Auburn is “next preferable.”

    Without doubt Beaumont and de Tocqueville were well aware of the horrible effect of idle solitary confinement. They called such punishment “beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it kills.” And yet they remained optimistic about solitary’s future application: “Can there be a combination more powerful for reformation than . . . solitude, [which] makes him find a charm in the converse of pious men, whom otherwise he would have seen with indifference, and heard without pleasure?” When they came across an isolated prisoner in Philadelphia who considered a cricket his companion, Beaumont and de Tocqueville waxed lyrically about how ripe his mind must be for “the influence of wise advice and pious exhortation.”
    Their attitude toward corporal punishment is no less confusing. They claim to oppose the lash, but then make apologies for its use. They insist prisoners in Auburn aren’t really whipped that much, that the lash is only “resorted to in extreme cases or not at all.” And in Sing Sing, where whippings were more common, Beaumont and de Tocqueville deem it a necessary deterrent, a physical aid to the “moral power” of silence and labor.

    After Democracy in America was published in 1835, prisons became part of the tourist circuit for travelers of a certain social station. Charles Dickens retraced some of the Frenchmen’s steps in 1842 and saw much of the same, such as a prisoner pacing his cell with “both hands clasped on his uplifted head, hear[ing] spirits tempting him to beat his brains out on the wall.” But rather than see potential for “pious exhortation,”