Prisons in the United States
Imprisonment as a form of criminal punishment became widespread in the United States just before the American Revolution, though penal incarceration efforts had been ongoing in England since as early as the 1500s, and prisons in the form of dungeons and various detention facilities had existed since long before then. Prison-building efforts in the United States during the Jacksonian Era led to widespread use of imprisonment and rehabilitative labor as the primary penalty for most crimes in nearly all states by the time of the American Civil War.
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, every state except North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida had amended its criminal code to provide for incarceration (primarily at hard labor) as the primary punishment for all but the most serious offenses. Provincial laws in Massachusetts began to prescribe short terms in the workhouse for deterrence throughout the eighteenth century and, by mid-century, the first statutes mandating long-term hard labor in the workhouse as a penal sanction appeared. This replaced earlier, more traditional forms of community-based punishment such as penal servitude, banishment, and public shaming such as the pillory.
By 1820, faith in the efficacy of legal reform was steadily declining. Statutory changes had had no noticeable effect on the level of crime, and prisons had become riotous and vulnerable to escapes. In response, New York developed the Auburn system in which prisoners were confined in separate cells and prohibited from talking when eating and working together. This penal method, where prisoners worked during the day in groups and were kept in solitary confinement at night, was implemented at Auburn State Prison and Sing Sing at Ossining.
The aim of this method was rehabilitative: The reformers talked about the penitentiary serving as a model for the family and the school. The assumption of rehabilitation was that people were not permanently criminal and that it was possible to restore a criminal to a useful life in which they could contribute to themselves and to society. Most states followed suit, although Pennsylvania went even further in separating prisoners. By the 1860s, however, overcrowding became common, partly due to long sentences given for violent crimes. Prisons saw increasing severity and often cruel methods of gagging and restraining prisoners. An increasing proportion of prisoners were new immigrants.
As a result of a tour of prisons in 18 states, Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight produced a monumental report describing the flaws in the existing system and proposing remedies. Notably, they found that not a single state prison was seeking the reformation of its inmates as a primary goal. In 1870, they set out an agenda for reform which was endorsed by a National Congress in Cincinnati. These ideas were put into practice in the Elmira Reformatory in New York in 1876 run by Zebulon Brockway. At the core of the design was an educational program, which included general subjects and vocational training for the less capable. Instead of fixed sentences, prisoners who did well could be released early.
Dorothea Dix and Asylum Reform
Attitudes toward the mentally ill also began to change during the time of the Enlightenment. In England and Europe, mental illness came to be viewed as a disorder that required compassionate treatment to aid in the rehabilitation of the victim. When the ruling monarch of the United Kingdom, George III, who suffered from a mental disorder, experienced a remission in 1789, mental illness also came to be seen as something that could be treated and cured. The introduction of moral treatment was initiated independently by the French doctor Philippe Pinel and the English Quaker William Tuke.
An important social justice reformer in American history, Dorothea Dix conducted a statewide investigation from 1840 to 1841 of how her home state of Massachusetts cared for the poor and mentally ill. In most cases, towns contracted with local individuals to care for people with mental disorders who could not care for themselves and who lacked family and friends to provide for them. Unregulated and underfunded, this system produced widespread abuse. After her survey, Dix published the results in a fiery report, "A Memorial," addressed to the state legislature. The outcome of her lobbying was a bill to expand the state's mental hospital in Worcester.
Dorothea Dix
Dorothea Dix was a crusader for the rights of the mentally ill and worked to improve conditions in asylums.
After her report, Dix traveled to states around the country, documenting the conditions of the poor and mentally ill and publishing memorials to state legislatures. She devoted enormous personal energy to working with committees to draft the enabling legislation needed to build asylums. Dix was influential in the establishment of Illinois's first state mental hospital and the construction of a hospital in North Carolina for the care of mentally ill patients, which was named in honor of Dorothea Dix and opened in 1856. She was also instrumental in the founding of the first public mental hospital in Pennsylvania, the Harrisburg State Hospital, and later in establishing its library and reading room in 1853.
The culmination of her work was the Bill for the Benefit of the Indigent Insane, legislation to set aside 12,225,000 acres of Federal land (10,000,000 acres for the benefit of the insane and the remainder for the "blind, deaf, and dumb"), with proceeds from its sale distributed to the states to build and maintain asylums. Dix's land bill passed both houses of Congress, but in 1854 President Franklin Pierce vetoed it, arguing that the federal government should not commit itself to social welfare, which was properly the responsibility of the states. In reaction to the defeat of her land bill, in 1854 and 1855 Dix traveled to England and Europe, where she conducted investigations of Scotland's madhouses that precipitated the Scottish Lunacy Commission. Dix continued to work for social reforms, focusing her energy on military hospitals during the Civil War.