Deeply researched and deeply reflective, The Crisis of Imprisonment redefines the central themes of 19th and early 20th century American prison history. Its story of the rise and fall of contractual penal servitude shows how questions of imprisonment, prison labor, and the treatment of prisoners lay at the heart of ongoing struggles over the meaning of freedom and unfreedom in America. Few scholars have succeeded so well in tracing the reciprocal relations between the institutions of punishment and the broader fields of economic and political power with which they are connected. Written with clarity and conviction, this is a major new work on the formation of the American penal state. - David Garland, New York University
Although there have been several fine studies of the thinking and influence of American prison reformers, McLennan has written a revealing study of the impact of popular politics, and especially of the prisoners themselves on the shaping and reshaping of state prison systems. She helps us understand the huge prison business of our times by analyzing controversies and prison revolts that led first to the development of contract prison labor then to its abolition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. - David Montgomery, Yale University
A timely, penetrating look into the horrors of the nineteenth-century prison system, its brutal-and brutalizing-convict labor system, and the mass of ordinary Americans who confronted its abuses and, ultimately, brought about its abolition. - Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking and The Death of Innocents
This is an extraordinary investigation and analysis of penal servitude and anti-prison labor campaigns in American history. Wonderfully insightful and illuminating, this work has much to teach us about where we've been and what we must consider in confronting the politics of legal punishment. - Bryan Stevenson, New York University School of Law, Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative
One of the smartest books about punishment I have ever read. And this is not just a book about prisons. The story Rebecca McLennan narrates so powerfully in these pages-the controversial career of penal servitude in a liberal democratic republic--has much to tell us about the history of American society, politics, and institutions. - Michael Willrich, Brandeis University, author of City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago
In a nation dedicated to liberty, the topic of the imprisoned deserves attention and the considerate analysis exhibited in this book. Essential. -Choice
