Hidden Literacies

Early Prison Reform

Maroney’s decade-long incarceration occurred as early national reformers furiously debated best practices in prison discipline and management. After 1790, a new theory of punishment—the “penitentiary”—began replacing stockades, brands, whips, and public execution, and widespread penitentiary construction began in earnest in the 1820s. Influenced by emerging scientific theories, penitentiaries were designed to remove prisoners from corrupting influences, to restrict an inmate’s interactions to select keepers and inspectors chosen for their benevolence and humanity, and to transform the supposedly unregulated body of the criminal through steady labor and regular habits. The first prison where Maroney served time, the State Prison at Greenwich (nicknamed “Newgate” after the infamous British prison), had been erected in 1796 under the vision of famed reformer Thomas Eddy, who dreamed of eliminating the barbarity of public punishment and the disorder of European prisons. But the prison Maroney experienced was a far cry from the institution heralded by reformers, and the narrative turns a sharp eye to Newgate’s corruption, waste, and mismanagement, all of which made inmates “ripe for rebellion, massacre, and plunder” (9).

After public scrutiny of Newgate’s overcrowding and corruption, the prison was marked for closure, and Maroney was transferred in 1825 to the recently erected penitentiary at Auburn, New York. Here, Maroney experienced the famed “congregate system” of punishment (also known as the “Auburn model”): male inmates were kept in enforced silence at all times, marched in strict lockstep, labored in communal prison workhouses making goods for private contractors, and confined to small solitary cells at night. Under the “congregate” model of prison labor, the state sought to further reduce costs by having older inmates train new inmates in the factory-style workhouses. Auburn was, in Foucault’s words, a “complete and austere institution,” purpose-built to completely transform occupants through moderation, obedience, silence, and above all, incessant daily labor. Maroney emphasizes the profound isolation of Auburn’s regime as well as the emotional impact of the penitentiary’s restrictive policies against speaking, reading, and writing: “no talking; no making motions or signals of any kind; no laughing . . . [Inmates] are not allowed to write or receive communications from any of their friends, or articles of any kind not even chalk, pencils . . . without permission from the keeper. I often thought that we were in worse bondage than the children of Israel, when under their Egyptian task-master. They cut off all intercourse, and made us solitary beings, in the midst of more than five hundred prisoners” (17). Facing the judgment of his community after emerging from ten years’ incarceration, Maroney wrote to recast his life, tip the scales of justice, and offset years of isolation. By depositing his narrative for copyright and publication, Maroney’s literacy act asserted the place of prisoners’ voices in public discourse, weighing in on national print debates on prison discipline .

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