A rhetoric of rehabilitation: Dorothea Dix's prison reform arguments.

• Author: Malsin, Mikaela J.
• Position: Critical essay

The early nineteenth century marked a critical moment in the history of American criminal punishment. The post-Revolutionary War period saw a trend away from capital and corporal punishment, toward mass imprisonment, which generated significant social and political controversy over the ideal practices of criminal justice. The form and function of the American penitentiary became a matter of debate that "raged with an incredible intensity" against the backdrop of the Second Great Awakening and its attendant social reformism (Rothman, 2002, p. 81). Rapid demographic shifts and the perception of skyrocketing crime rates drove criminal punishment issues to the fore. The problem of how to respond to behavior considered "deviant" occupied public attention on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing thinkers such as Charles Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville to visit and evaluate America's prisons.

Into this milieu stepped Dorothea Dix, a social reformer and advocate for "the helpless and forgotten" who would be pronounced by Charles Sumner as "herself alone a whole Prison Discipline Society" (Brown, 1998, p. 134; Thomas, 1965, p. 663). Dix spent the years between 1838 and the Civil War traveling throughout the United States, studying and reporting on the institutions that housed criminals, the mentally ill, and the poor. She lobbied for state and federal legislation to improve living conditions for those who could not request it for themselves. Over the course of the 1840s, she became known for her singular knowledge of the nation's penitentiaries, as no other reformer had studied these institutions so thoroughly. In fact, Dix's male contemporaries sought her expertise on criminal punishment (Brown, 1998; Gollaher, 1995; Lightner, 1999). In response, Dix published a treatise in 1848 entitled Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States, as well as a series of memorials to state legislatures assessing various prisons and jails and advocating particular reforms.

In early accounts of nineteenth-century reform, Dix was underappreciated, most likely because she worked outside of the institutions and organizations that marked much of what we know about women in antebellum reform movements (see, e.g., Campbell, 1989; Torrens, 1999). More recently, scholars have come to regard Dix as one of "America's greatest women," a "forgotten Samaritan" who "reformed the moral sensibility of her time" (Brown, 1998, p. xi; Field, 1999; Gollaher, 1993; Greenstone, 1979; Marshall, 1967; Thomas, 1965; Viney & Zorich, 1982). Dix is considered a major figure in nineteenth-century humanitarian activism and an important prison reformist who pushed for prisons' rehabilitative potential. She has even been credited with initiating the prison reform movement-an anachronistic claim that nevertheless reveals the importance of Dix's work (Krieger & Birn, 1998).

Despite Dix's historical significance and the esteem with which her contemporaries regarded her views, rhetoricians have yet to attend to the crucial role she played in crafting rhetorical strategies of nineteenth century prison reform arguments. (1) This gap merits particular attention in light of ongoing, intensifying debates over the modern American criminal justice system. Communication and cultural studies scholars have called for a renewed critical focus on "the many ways the prison-industrial complex has reshaped our public discourse, penal policy, economic interests, and democratic practices" (Hartnett, 2008; Hartnett, Novek, & Wood, 2013; PCARE, 2007, p. 404). It is vital that we interrogate the public arguments that inform and are informed by the increasingly pervasive role of the prison in American life. Furthermore, as John Sloop has argued, "The cultural articulation of the prisoner and the punished teaches everyone, convict and law-abiding citizen alike, his or her position relative to cultural institutions that constitute the culture at large" (Sloop, 1996, p. 3). Understanding how we construct criminality can offer scholars a fuller grasp on the norms and ideals of public culture (see, e.g., Herman, 2003; McCann, 2014; Stabile, 2006; Yousman, 2009). Furthermore, this essay attends to the historical and rhetorical antecedents of the contemporary American prison-industrial complex. Since reform advocates of the Jacksonian Era were responsible for "establishing the administrative viability of the penitentiary," this presents a particularly important moment to analyze (Hirsch, 1992, p. 68). Dix represented an important voice in the nineteenth-century rise of rehabilitation rhetoric, which framed the penitentiary as an institution of reform and shaped the American approach to criminal punishment until the late twentieth century's turn to a "culture of control (Garland, 2002). Therefore, in this essay I analyze Due's major texts on prisons in order to enhance our understanding of the rhetoric of rehabilitation surrounding criminal punishment and prison reform in antebellum America. (2)

The essay begins with an assessment of the historical and rhetorical contexts surrounding Dix's prison writings. I then engage in an analysis of Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States, "An Account of the Jails and Poor-Houses in Illinois," and A Review of the Present Condition of the State Penitentiary of Kentucky. I find that Dix crafted a rhetoric of rehabilitation that shaped prison reform throughout the nineteenth century. Specifically, I argue that Dix's social scientific rhetoric positioned her as a disinterested observer in the midst of an acrimonious debate; that the rhetoric of moral contagion supported isolation as the best "cure" for the "disease" of criminality; and that the narrative of Unitarian regeneration constructed rehabilitation as a familiar religious conversion. Finally, I discuss the influence of Dix's arguments on the rhetorics of crime and punishment in the United States, then and now.

CHANGE AND PERMANENCE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

Dix lived and worked in a time of transformation and upheaval in the United States. As Carroll Smith Rosenberg explained, "America[n] society from the 1830s to the 1860s was marked by advances in political democracy, by a rapid increase in economic, social and geographic mobility, and by uncompromising and morally relentless reform movements" (C. S. Rosenberg, 1971, p. 563). Such movements were driven in part by the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that spread throughout the country. At the same time, the young republic was in the process of inheriting from Europe the ideals and inspiration of the Enlightenment. The "spirit of progress and enlightenment" crept into criminal jurisprudence and penal administration (Barnes, 1921, p. 41). In colonial America, few people had been punished through incarceration. Instead, jails served primarily for pre-trial and pre-sentence detention, and criminals were punished through fines, corporal punishment, and execution. That system became untenable with the seismic societal shifts that followed the Revolutionary War. The population rose rapidly: between 1790 and 1830, the total number of people living in the United States tripled, from 3.9 million to 12.9 million (Poston & Bouvier, 2010, p. 288). Along with the increased population came increased crime rates and, in turn, heightened public anxiety. Furthermore, the dispersion of European Enlightenment thinking on crime led many Americans to determine that the barbaric nature of corporal and capital punishment actually caused crime rather than controlled crime rates (Rothman, 2002). In the search for alternatives, the European workhouse model provided inspiration for facilities that reformed criminals by putting them to work (Hirsch, 1992). In the 1790s, Pennsylvania and New York opened the first state prisons, followed in the early nineteenth century by New Jersey, Kentucky, Virginia, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Georgia (Meskell, 1999). Capital and corporal punishment gradually gave way to incarceration. Thus, the penitentiary emerged as the primary penal institution in the decades following the Revolutionary War.

The early penitentiaries, however, suffered from ineffective administration and massive overpopulation. Overcrowding, disorder, escapes, and riots threatened prisons' legitimacy in the eyes of the public (Hirsch, 1992; Rothman, 2002). Furthermore, as reformists, politicians, and intellectuals pondered the origins of crime, "the focus shifted to the deviant and the penitentiary" (Rothman, 2002, p. 62). Observers from prison officials to philanthropists came to locate the genesis of deviant behavior in the criminal's personal history, and particularly in neglect and failure on the part of the offender's family and community (S. G. Howe, 1846). Most believed that rehabilitation was both possible for these criminals and beneficial for American society, and that a properly designed prison could achieve such aims. Arguments along these lines reflected the Puritan ideals of hard work and individual perfectionism, updated by the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Two primary concerns, then, precipitated the movement to reform prisons in the 1820s: the rampant problems evident in the first set of penitentiaries and an interest in turning the American prison into a structure that could "reform the criminal, stabilize American society, and demonstrate how to improve the condition of mankind" (Rothman, 2002, p. 79). Out of this objective emerged two competing systems of prison organization. By 1830, the principles of "solitary confinement at hard labor" gained legitimacy in what was popularly called the "Pennsylvania system" (Barnes, 1921, p. 49). The New York state prison in Auburn initially modeled itself after the Pennsylvania system. Following initial failures, however, Auburn shifted to a second model in which convicts worked in congregation during the day but slept alone at night...