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By Root 1796 0

“I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” The wounds it inflicted “are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear”; but there was a “depth of terrible endurance ... which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature.” The prisoners, who entered in black hoods, emblems of the “curtain dropped” between them “and the living world,” were like men “buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.”82

The novelist’s words ring truer today than De Tocqueville’s, but it did not seem so at the time. The penitentiary system spread, though mostly in the North, and in fits and starts. What held it back was not humanity but stinginess and lethargy. When Beaumont and De Tocqueville observed the prison system in 1831, New York, with Auburn and Sing Sing, was very “advanced” in reform; but New Jersey, just across the river, had “retained all the vices of the ancient system.” Ohio, despite a “mild” penal code, had “barbarous prisons.” The two Frenchmen “deeply sighed” at the situation in Cincinnati; they found half of the prisoners chained in irons, “and the rest plunged into an infected dungeon.” In New Orleans, men were locked “together with hogs, in the midst of all odors and nuisances,” and chained “like ferocious beasts”; there was no attempt to make the criminals “better,” but only to tame their “malice”; instead of “being corrected, they are rendered brutal.”83 In the Ohio prison, where “prisoners of every variety of character” were “indiscriminately associated,” the prisoners, “as might naturally be expected,” spent much of their time “in mutual contamination and in devising plans of escape.”84

In the South, there was a fierce debate over the penitentiary system.85 South Carolina, perhaps the most conservative state in the slave belt, never built one.q Whipping and shaming punishments (and the gallows) stayed on the books in South Carolina. The very arguments that made the prison seem preferable in the North, did not work in South Carolina, where “face-to-face contact remained important and where honor was accorded great protection.”87 The more “primitive” punishments, in other words, survived in this more primitive section of the country. Here were the fewest cities, factories, mines. Traditional punishment suited this almost feudal social system: the honor code, shame and humiliation, corporal punishment. And for slaves, bodily punishment was considered most effective, and, in fact, downright indispensable.88

Of course, even in those states that had embraced the penitentiary system, the ancient jails survived, on the local or county level; and indeed they were infused with a new function. They were no longer merely holding pens but places of punishment; and this made their inadequacies stand out all the more: often they were filthy, degraded and degrading, poorly run, and cruel by omission or design. The city jail of Savannah, Georgia, according to a Superior Court grand jury, was “inhuman and demoralizing.”89 The jail in Coosawatchie, South Carolina, was so bad that a contemporary said it was not necessary to “try a criminal there ... with a capital offense. All that was required was to put him in jail.... The State paid for a coffin, and saved the expenses of trial and execution.”90

As for the penitentiaries themselves, the system, even in the North, despite the great hopes and the fanfare, ended up as a failure. The classic system melted away like winter snows. As a practical matter, it proved impossible to enforce the pure system of silence. It was gone in Massachusetts by about 1850.91 Regimentation was probably also never quite so absolute as intended. Charles Dickens reported that one prisoner in Philadelphia “was allowed, as an indulgence, to keep rabbits,” which was certainly not part of the original plan in all its purity.92 By about the time of the