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Asylum, Prison, and Poorhouse
This illustrated collection of annotated newspaper articles and memorials by Dorothea Dix provides a forum for the great mid-nineteenth-century humanitarian and reformer to speak for herself. Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802#150;87) was perhaps the most famous and admired woman in America for much of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the early 1840s, she launched a personal crusade to persuade the various states to provide humane care and effective treatment for the mentally ill by funding specialized hospitals for that purpose. The appalling conditions endured by most mentally ill inmates in prisons, jails, and poorhouses led her to take an active interest also in prison reform and in efforts to ameliorate poverty. In 1846#150;47 Dix brought her crusade to Illinois. She presented two lengthy memorials to the legislature, the first describing conditions at the state penitentiary at Alton and the second discussing the sufferings of the insane and urging the establishment of a state hospital for their care. She also wrote a series of newspaper articles detailing conditions in the jails and poorhouses of many Illinois communities. These long-forgotten documents, which appear in unabridged form in this book, contain a wealth of information on the living conditions of some of the most unfortunate inhabitants of Illinois. In his preface, David L. Lightner describes some of the vivid images that emerge from Dorothea Dix's descriptions of social conditions in Illinois a century and a half ago: "A helpless maniac confined throughout the bitter cold of winter to a dark and filthy pit. Prison inmates chained in hallways and cellars because no more men can be squeezed into the dank and airless cells. Aged paupers auctioned off by county officers to whoever will maintain them at the lowest cost." Lightner provides an introduction to every document, placing each memorial and newspaper article in its proper social and historical context. He also furnishes detailed notes, making these documents readily accessible to readers a century and a half later. In his final chapter, Lightner assesses both the immediate and the continuing impact of Dix's work.
Defining Documents in American History: Prison Reform
Prisoners have been part of the population in the Americas since the first settlers arrived from Europe. Since then, there have been efforts to reform and improve the prison system in this country. This volume gathers together and analyzes documents that discuss the fierce debates and legislation related to prison reform, the privatization of prisons, the efforts to end practices like solitary confinement, and the improvement of mental health care in prisons. Documents analyzed in these volumes include: Remarks on Prisons and Prison Systems in the United States by Dorothea Dix; the Declaration of Principles by the National Congress of Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline; Fifty Years of Prison Service: An Autobiography, by Zebulon Reed Brockway; Changing Lenses-A New Focus for Crime and Justice by Howard Zehr, "Privatizing Correctional Institutions: An Organizational Perspective," by David Shichor and the FIRST STEP Act.
Reading Prisoners: Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700-1845
Shining new light on early American prison literature--from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and gallows literature to its later works of autobiography, expos#65533;, and imaginative literature--Reading Prisoners weaves together insights about the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in the "long" eighteenth century. Looking first at colonial America--an era often said to devalue jailhouse literacy--Jodi Schorb reveals that in fact this era launched the literate prisoner into public prominence. Criminal confessions published between 1700 and 1740, she shows, were crucial "literacy events" that sparked widespread public fascination with the reading habits of the condemned, consistent with the evangelical revivalism that culminated in the first Great Awakening. By century's end, narratives by condemned criminals helped an audience of new writers navigate the perils and promises of expanded literacy. Schorb takes us off the scaffold and inside the private world of the first penitentiaries--such as Philadelphia's Walnut Street Prison and New York's Newgate, Auburn, and Sing Sing. She unveils the long and contentious struggle over the value of prisoner education that ultimately led to sporadic efforts to supply prisoners with books and education. Indeed, a new philosophy emerged, one that argued that prisoners were best served by silence and hard labor, not by reading and writing--a stance that a new generation of convict authors vociferously protested. The staggering rise of mass incarceration in America since the 1970s has brought the issue of prisoner rehabilitation once again to the fore. Reading Prisoners offers vital background to the ongoing, crucial debates over the benefits of prisoner education.
COM Library has full image periodical archives from some great sources. The top archives that have coverage for this era are linked below.
The Invasion (D-Day),1944
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