How have Christian views of resurrection and mortification shaped American prisons?
The modern penitentiary, with its dual aims of punishment and rehabilitation, was conceived around the turn of the nineteenth century, and it was shaped by the prevailing ideologies of its time. When the reformers imagined the transformation of the criminal into a model citizen, they used the language of spiritual redemption. The Quakers, for example, were deeply involved in the movement that produced Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary; its system of full-time solitary confinement was thought to cultivate reflection and penitence. The evangelical and temperance movements shared an ideal of personal conversion. Monastic traditions, too, informed both prison architecture and the legal concept of “civil death,” which stripped away convicts’ civil rights. The penitentiary was supposed to be a place of redemptive suffering on the way to a spiritual and civil resurrection. What do you mean when you say that prisoners at Eastern State Penitentiary were buried alive? The English novelis
