WITH LIBERTY FOR SOME: 500 YEARS OF IMPRISONMENT IN AMERICA by Scott Christianson. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. 313 pp. (377 pp. notes and bibliography). $35.00. ISBN 1-55553-364-7.

Reviewed by Charles Robert Davidson, J.D., M.A.L.D., Ph.D. Candidate, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Email: cdavidso@emerald.tufts.edu.

Adopting a broad conception of imprisonment, Scott Christianson undertakes an extensive social history of imprisonment in America, from its earliest origins in institutions such as indentured servitude and chattel slavery to its most current embodiments. In WITH LIBERTY FOR SOME: 500 YEARS OF IMPRISONMENT IN AMERICA, Christianson chronicles in great detail the historical evolution of not only prisons but of other forms of institutionalized deprivation of freedom. The premise underlying this interesting work evokes the tensions inherent in the socially-sanctioned bondage of segments of society with the democratic ideals for which the American nation has long been renowned. Of course, Christianson is not the first to take cognizance of this dilemma; observers such as de Toqueville and Myrdal noted the patent contradiction between ideals and practice in America. Christianson may, however, be among the first to do so in such an accessible and engaging fashion: his richly researched material comes from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, which permit him to impart to the reader a vivid sense of the larger social context in which the institution of imprisonment has evolved in America. Valuable contextual insight is further provided by contemporaneous anecdotal accounts of both the imprisoner and imprisoned. This work is not however merely narrative history, and while its anecdotal insights are of interest, Christianson has also furnished a solid conceptual and analytical framework for understanding the role imprisonment has played in America over the past several hundred years.

From the earliest days of colonial America imprisonment has played in important role in the socioeconomic makeup of the country. In order to rid English society of "undesirables" and to secure labor to work the new colonial holdings, convicted felons were shipped off to the new American colonies. Women and children (hence the term "kidnapping") soon too were forcibly rounded up and shipped to work in the colonies, as agents in England began abducting individuals from the streets of London and other industrial centers for transshipment to the colonies. This practice, though a highly lucrative for some, proved insufficient to satisfy the growing demand for labor in the North American colonies and a new source of labor had to be found. By 1718, English courts of law began sentencing offenders to "transportation," that is, a forced deportation from one’s homeland to work for a specified period of time in the colonies. Despite outcries on both sides of the Atlantic the practice of kidnapping and transportation endured, indeed flourished, for many years.

In 1619, the first African slaves arrived in Virginia. As the needs of the agrarian South for labor grew in direct proportion to the expansion in cotton cultivation, a still larger labor pool was needed. The importation of African slaves thus began in earnest with implications that continue to resonate in American society today. Christianson’s historiographical approach makes for edifying reading, particularly to those who may not be accustomed to conceiving of institution such as slavery as being conceptually akin to imprisonment in its modern incarnation. Christianson spares no detail in demonstrating the brutality and the dehumanizing aspects of such bondage and the passages depicting the horrors of forced deportation and the Middle Passage are particularly disturbing.

The history of imprisonment in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery is checkered at best; while the period was largely characterized by shockingly harsh conditions of confinement (the setting afire of epileptic inmates after their having been doused in alcohol to detect faking, for instance, or the use of "the lash, the paddle, the dark cell, and the cooler, among other instruments of torture."), there also emerged in this period a reformist movement which opposed the infliction of pain and which advanced instead the notion of reformation of offenders. Although numerous attempts were made to improve the conditions of confinement, and prison officials were increasingly held accountable, in the main, the conduct of correctional affairs and the treatment of prisoners remained matters largely outside of the public consciousness. This historical lack of transparency, in tandem with the virtually unfettered discretion enjoyed by correctional officials has long been the source of unconscionably inhumane treatment of prisoners. As the author notes, while this veil of secrecy has to some degree been pierced in modern times by judicial intervention, there yet remains a great degree of secrecy enshrouding these institutions which today house in total over a million Americans.

Christianson does a marvelous job of placing contemporary correctional practice in context such that one can see that much of what is touted today as "modern corrections" has deeper roots in practices (many discarded) of the past. Christianson notes that "…many recent developments appeared to represent a step back into the nineteenth century, to a time before judicial intervention, legal empowerment of inmates, or laws governing the workplace." For instance, while prison privatization may be all the rage in the 1990s—the decade between 1985-1995 alone saw a 500 per cent increase in prison privatization—prison systems in the postbellum South routinely leased out inmates and institutions to private concerns. Moreover, the initiative on the part of several states to reintroduce the chain gang and to require inmates to pay for their keep also hearken back to prison practices long discarded.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing propositions advanced here by Christianson deals with the racial context of imprisonment. The racial aspects of imprisonment were most obvious in chattel slavery and its aftermath, however, as Christianson shows, these issues—lamentably—remain pertinent today. Here arises another central paradox to which the author frequently returns: how is it, he queries, that the United States which prides itself on the equality of all persons, continues to engage in the large scale confinement of people of color, at rates so vastly greater than those for whites, that one can only impute a discriminatory animus to the entire law enforcement process, from arrest to incarceration? With the incarceration rate of black males almost eight times greater than that of white males, and at rates higher than during South African apartheid, Christianson opines that the expansion in cotton chirty-five years after Lincoln’s great Emancipation, and more than two hundred years after the Declaration of Independence, the United States seemed to be heading full circle: it was moving, as a national commission had warned after the Watts riot of 1965 ‘toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."

In WITH LIBERTY FOR SOME, the author sounds the tocsin: the matrix of growing rates of incarceration in tandem with racial polarities in imprisonment rates, decreased judicial supervision of the correctional environment, and the resurrection of the profit motive in corrections, among other things, threatens to subvert the very principles of equality and justice for all upon which American society is ostensibly grounded. While critics may argue that Christianson’s accounts are partial towards prisoners and that short shrift is given to the fact that many of those incarcerated indeed should be—he is doubtless correct in admonishing those of us who enjoy our freedoms that by disregarding the rights and the welfare of a growing segment of society, we are do great violence to the very ideals upon which our society is built. If the state of a nation’s prisons is indeed the mirror of that nation’s attainment of civilization as Dostoyevsky argues, then according to Scott Christianson, we have still a long way to go before we can rightfully pride ourselves on being the civilized nation that we so unquestionably believe we are.

With segments on topical issues such as sentencing guidelines, the intergenerational impact of imprisonment, and social theory analysis of incarceration, Christianson’s book is a virtually exhaustive treatment of the subject of imprisonment. A remarkable scholarly achievement, WITH LIBERTY FOR SOME is at the same time eminently readable and full of fascinating anecdotes, which makes it satisfying for both the specialist and the non-specialist. Anyone desiring to better grasp the paradoxes which inhere in the American criminal corrections system will find WITH LIBERTY FOR SOME gripping reading.

Copyright 1995