Jail is a distinct historical institution that has served various functions in different times, places, and for different populations. To our detriment, jails have been lumped in with discussions of prisons and penitentiaries as carceral structures in need of reform and remedied by the developments of nineteenth century reformative strategies of punishment. This panel will showcase the importance of the jail as a discrete subject of study. Focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this panel brings scholarly attention back to jails, framing them not merely as carceral sites but as social, cultural, and political spaces. Collectively, the papers consider what intellectual work a more capacious understanding of jails could generate and what we might learn from framing these institutions within a more diverse range of “sites of confinement.” They highlight how jails facilitated and supported chattel slavery; functioned as holding cells for legal witnesses, debtors, and unhoused people; controlled the body and mobility; and shaped public opinions. This work contributes to the ongoing reevaluation of the historiography of the carceral state, placing its origins earlier and further outside the boundaries of bars and stone walls than most of the literature has previously acknowledged.

This session asks the following questions: What stories do jails tell? When is a jail more than jail? How have limited temporal and spatial conceptions of jail curtailed more expansive discussions? By foregrounding circulation within and through the jail, John Bardes reframes the prison not only as a technology of immobilization but also, paradoxically, as an infrastructure that helped produce and transmit the very forms of resistant strategizing it sought to suppress. Justin T. Clark considers the literary depiction of carceral time – the prison chronotope, as some literary scholars have called it – and how it became an important reference for both supporters and opponents of fixed-term carceral sentencing. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan evaluates the deployment of hunger and the provision of specific foods as penal tools to specific prisoners based on conceptions of class, criminality, and institutional function. Nicole Breault examines the spatial dimensions of jail in colonial Boston. Making the gaol, and the myriad objects and spaces temporarily used to jail people legible, she recovers how permanent and moveable structures were built and unbuilt, moved, and reconfigured to create an overlapping punitive matrix.