Are Prisons Obsolete?

Davis opens Chapter 3 by pointing out that prison reform has existed for as long as prisons because the prison itself was once viewed as a reform of corporal punishment. She includes Michel Foucault’s description of a 1757 execution as an example of the horrific punishments that led to an outcry for reform. Imprisonment as punishment rose to prominence in 18th-century Europe and the 19th-century US, aligning with other cultural changes like the Enlightenment, Protestant reform, and industrial capitalism. Davis explores how new understandings of inalienable rights and liberties developed during this period, and incarceration became a viable punishment because it stripped man of these rights. Women, who did not have access to these rights at the time, were punished in the domestic space without objection from reformists. As society began to calculate and compensate labor by time, so too did the prison system calculate punishment by time owed to penitence. She suggests that incarceration reflects the best conditions of justice and reform for this specific period, but she believes that there must be an alternative system that better reflects the ideals of our own era.

The author then discusses two reformists—John Howard and Jeremy Bentham—whose theories influenced the establishment of penitentiaries, both structurally and ideologically.