The Soft Cell

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE DISCOVERY OF THE ASYLUM by David J. Rothman. 376 pages. Little, Brown. $12.50.

No proper tour of America in the 1830s would have been complete without a visit to a penitentiary. European governments even dispatched special envoys to observe what was then called "a grand theater, for the trial of all new plans in hygiene and education, in physical and moral reform." The grand design applied to lunatic asylums and poorhouses as well. Order, discipline and cleanliness benevolently imposed in public institutions would rehabilitate the criminal, conquer insanity and resurrect the indigent. Social Philosophers Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Auguste de Beaumont noted after an official look at New World progress that Americans had made a profession out of "philanthropy." With a touch of Gallic skepticism, they added the phrase "which to them seems the remedy for all the evils of society."

Indeed, the notion that man is born innocent and that evil resides in society got a vigorous workout in the America of the 1820s and '30s. Prisoners invariably claimed that they were victims of misunderstandings, cruel circumstances and broken homes. Mental illness, too, was ascribed to a civilization madly concerned with getting and spending. Thus, if society was responsible, its victims should be isolated from corrupting influences and drilled in the virtues of hard work and obedience. Keeping inmates untainted meant keeping them apart from one another as well as from society as a whole. Accordingly, under Pennsylvania's penal system, prisoners not only worked alone, but each new convict was kept hooded until safely in his own cell. Walls and air vents were often designed to prevent communication, and prison architecture was elevated to one of the "moral sciences."

Depraved Man. Such measures were quite revolutionary compared with what preceded them, as David Rothman, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, documents in this tightly focused study of the treatment of "deviant" behavior in Jacksonian America. During the colonial and post-Revolutionary periods, older ideologies had prevailed. Then it was held that deviance was caused by the depraved nature of man, not society. God had so ordained, and John Calvin so maintained. Punishments did not so much fit the crime as the criminal. A man of property would usually be fined; a man without property was whipped. Since human nature was essentially and forever evil, there was no thought of correcting it by periods of confinement. Communities simply excluded unwanted strangers or prospective charity cases.

Some cities, including Boston, Philadelphia and New York, built almshouses for the indigent, but they were not institutions in the 19th and 20th century sense. In structure and routine, they were extensions of the colonial family. Even jails for debtors or those awaiting trial were homey places. Escapes were so frequent that some towns held the jailer responsible for the debts of an escaped prisoner.

Measure of Security. That all changed between 1790 and 1830, when a burgeoning America shelved the old determinism for a new faith in progress and perfectibility. The new doctrine, however, proved as simplistic as the old and, as Rothman patiently shows, it, too, would eventually drown in change and gigantism. By the 1850s, overcrowding and lack of funds or trained personnel had turned penitentiaries, asylums and almshouses into little more than custodial institutions filled largely by lower-class immigrants. Only juvenile reformatories maintained anything like the old standards--mainly because incorrigibles were shipped out on long whaling voyages. By the Civil War, incarceration had pretty much become an end in itself, providing little more than a measure of security and convenience for the community. As Rothman notes,

"The rhetoric in the Jacksonian period had justified confinement, and the next generation could resort to it without especial difficulty." Ideals, it would seem, are just as flexible as people.

R.Z. Sheppard

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