Measuring Inward Capacity: Race, Silence, and the Limits of Rehabilitation in US Penitentiaries, 1790–1848

This paper demonstrates how early republican penal experiments with silent punishment contributed to new ideas and practices around race and racial categorization. While penal historians have long considered these early models of reformative incarceration to be directed primarily at the discipling of free white male labor, I demonstrate how reformed prisons within the industrializing Northeast disproportionately targeted Black, Native American, and immigrant populations from their inception. As state authorities sought to resolve questions around freedom, bondage, and the extent of universal citizenship, they also proposed extensive plans for prison redesign and expansion. Within the context of gradual emancipation, I show how the introduction of modern forms of reformative carceral punishment such as enforced silence, coerced labor, and solitary confinement, generated a new body of medical and proto-criminological research that organized humans into hierarchical regimes of social difference. By examining ledger books and medical reports issued by physicians across Northeastern prisons, this paper pays particular attention to the various types of medical knowledge produced within reformed penitentiaries in relation to silent punishment and auditory control. Prison physicians frequently argued that the system of silent punishment was only suitable for white men, who had the “appropriate physical constitution” for such isolation. Black and Native American subjects, they claimed, were physically unable to endure silent confinement, and were therefore incapable of internal transformation, and by extension ineligible for full legal and political subjecthood. Drawing on archival research from prisons across the Northeast including Auburn and Sing Sing Prison in New York, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and Wethersfield State Prison in Connecticut, I argue that prison physicians instituted new carceral methods of racial classification influenced by contemporaneous social thought around race, gender, criminality, and proto-psychological theories of the mind and inward capacity.