With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America.

With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America. By Scott Christianson (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. xix plus 394pp.).

Imprisonment, Scott Christianson argues, has been a defining feature of American life since Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World with a crew composed largely of impressed sailors and until the present day, when federal, state, and local prisons and jails incarcerate almost two million people. To make this argument, Christianson defines "imprisonment" extremely broadly, including not only penal incarceration, but also slavery, indentured servitude, and captivity as prisoners of war. This very breadth represents Christianson's most important innovation as well as one of this book's main problems.

Christianson portrays imprisonment as a method of controlling labor, of regulating political and military opponents, and most importantly, as a mechanism for establishing and maintaining racial dominance. In particular, he portrays racial slavery as one form of imprisonment. The international slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated within the context of an equally-important international trade in indentured servants and in prisoners sentenced to "transportation" by English courts. Christianson suggests that there was little initial distinction among slaves, servants, and convicts, asserting that by 1650, most immigrants to the New World arrived as prisoners of one type or another (13). In North America, however, captivity acquired a racial dimension. While imprisonment constituted only "temporary restraint" for whites, it gradually escalated into "total control"--slavery--for blacks (53). Thus, Christianson reformulates the familiar concept that indentured servitude evolved into raci al slavery by characterizing imprisonment as the central feature of this process. This argument also represents a significant departure from most other histories of prisons per se, which tend to indicate that imprisonment did not become common until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Race continued to be key to the subsequent history of incarceration. Following the abolition of slavery in the United States, Christianson suggests that prisons served as a substitute. Even though most northern states ended slavery by the early nineteenth century, the inequities in northern law and society created a prison population that was already disproportionately black. Likewise, when the southern states were forced to abandon slavery following the Civil War, they often enacted "Black Codes" designed to entrap newly-freed blacks in criminal violations. In addition, many states established systems of convict leasing whereby businesses could rent the labor of overwhelmingly black inmates, effectively recreating slavery on a smaller scale. While these conditions no longer exist, modern prisons continue to house blacks and other minorities in numbers vastly disproportionate to the general population. Moreover, Christianson suggests that modern prisons have an impact on black culture comparable to that of s lavery-they separate families, destroy communities, and create antagonism between the prisoners and the larger society.

Unfortunately, Christianson's provocative effort to reshape thinking about the history of imprisonment will not satisfy many historians. His book is most stimulating in its discussion of the colonial period and of very recent decades, the two eras least covered in other histories of the prison. It is weakest, however, in its treatment of prisons from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the period most thoroughly analyzed elsewhere. For example, Christianson emphasizes the brutal nature of prisons throughout American history, but he minimizes other key elements of the story: their tremendous expansion in scale and number in the early nineteenth century, the frequent waves of ideological reform followed by retrenchment in practice, and, more generally, changes and variations in prison operations. In this account, prisons all seem to be alike.

In addition, Christianson employs a narrative, rather than analytic, style of writing. Often, this strategy succeeds; the use of narrative contributes to some of the best aspects of the book. Christianson's description, for example, of efforts by Tom Murton (superintendent of the Tucker prison farm in Arkansas) to reform his institution and the entire state prison system reveals many of the nuances involved in prison operations, including the need to satisfy many constituencies and the difficulty of achieving institutional change. On the other hand, Christianson's narrative style also contributes to a certain aimlessness in much of the book. For example, a chapter describing the experiences of turn-of-the-century political prisoners (including well-known figures such as Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, and Marcus Garvey) has little argument to drive it. Simply asserting that they were incarcerated for political reasons only begins to explain the political and social conflicts of the time.

Christianson, a former investigative reporter and state criminal justice official, was not trained as a professional historian, and this disciplinary difference is apparent in both his style and his use of sources. This book is based on exhaustive research in published documents, prisoners' accounts of their experiences, state and local investigations of prison conditions, and a surprising array of historical accounts written since the late nineteenth century. The book does not, however, make much use of archival sources nor does it seem to evaluate much of its evidence critically. In addition, while Christianson cites the latest historiography on prisons, he rarely incorporates historians' interpretations into his own work nor does he acknowledge either his debts or his challenges to established ideas.

Christianson pursues an explicit goal of using history to explain how the modern American prison system came to be the way it is (xii). He effectively demonstrates that the well-known problems of late twentieth-century American prisons--one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world, a disproportionate concentration of black and Hispanic inmates, and a rush to build even more prisons--all have historical roots. These roots are more apparent by thinking about imprisonment in the past very broadly, emphasizing the repressive nature of historical incarceration, and including forms of captivity (such as slavery) that might not always be considered "imprisonment". Christianson's emphasis on continuities from the past make his work a useful tool for understanding the historical basis for contemporary problems, but it diminishes his ability to explain the past itself or to account for historical change.