Should prisons attempt reform and uplift inmates or, by means of principled punishment, deter them from further wrongdoing? This debate has raged in Western Europe and in the United States at least since the late eighteenth century. Joseph F. Spillane examines the failure of progressive reform in New York State by focusing on Coxsackie, a New Deal reformatory built for young male offenders. Opened in 1935 to serve adolescents adrift, Coxsackie instead became an unstable and brutalizing prison. From the start, the liberal impulse underpinning the prison's mission was overwhelmed by challenges it was unequipped or unwilling to face-drugs, gangs, and racial conflict. Spillane draws on detailed prison records to reconstruct a life behind bars in which ungovernable young men posed constant challenges to racial and cultural order. The New Deal order of the prison was unstable from the start; the politics of punishment quickly became the politics of race and social exclusion, and efforts to save liberal reform in postwar New York only deepened its failures. In 1977, inmates took hostages to focus attention on their grievances. The result was stricter discipline and an end to any pretense that Coxsackie was a reform institution. Why did the prison fail? For answers, Spillane immerses readers in the changing culture and racial makeup of the U.S. prison system and borrows from studies of colonial prisons, which emblematized efforts by an exploitative regime to impose cultural and racial restraint on others. In today's era of mass incarceration, prisons have become conflict-ridden warehouses and powerful symbols of racism and inequality. This account challenges the conventional wisdom that America's prison crisis is of comparatively recent vintage, showing instead how a racial and punitive system of control emerged from the ashes of a progressive ideal.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN-13
9781421413228
eBay Product ID (ePID)
208861713
Product Key Features
Subject Area
Criminal Law
Author
Joseph F. Spillane
Publication Name
Coxsackie: the Life and Death of Prison Reform
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Subject
History, Criminology
Publication Year
2014
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
312 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
229mm
Item Width
152mm
Item Weight
567g
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Joseph F. Spillane
Series Title
Reconfiguring American Political History
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States
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