Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America

A look at how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States, reissued with a new preface that connects these early penitentiaries to our present debates over mass incarceration

Liberty’s Prisoners examines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in Philadelphia in 1790, a period of g...