Description
Book SynopsisHow progressive good intentions failed at Coxsackie, once a model New York State prison for youth offenders.
Should prisons attempt reform and uplift inmates or, by means of principled punishment, deter them from further wrongdoing? This debate has raged in Western Europe and in the United States at least since the late eighteenth century.
Joseph F. Spillane examines the failure of progressive reform in New York State by focusing on Coxsackie, a New Deal reformatory built for young male offenders. Opened in 1935 to serve adolescents adrift, Coxsackie instead became an unstable and brutalizing prison. From the start, the liberal impulse underpinning the prison's mission was overwhelmed by challenges it was unequipped or unwilling to facedrugs, gangs, and racial conflict.
Spillane draws on detailed prison records to reconstruct a life behind bars in which ungovernable young men posed constant challenges to racial and cultural order. The New Deal order of the
Trade Review
Damn it's compelling... If you're interested in the historical roots of our prison system, you ought to spend an evening with this book. -- Alfred Brophy, UNC School of Law The Faculty Lounge Archival shelves laden with criminal justice records await informed examination. Historian Spillane found a pertinent data set and analyzed it, brilliantly so. Choice Should be required reading for historians of juvenile and criminal corrections... Presents a compelling cautionary tale that contemporary would-be reformers ignore at their peril, while offering important new insights for scholars. American Historical Review
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: The Ashes of Reform
Part I: The Rapid Rise of Prison Reform in New York, 1929–1944
1. The Reformer's Mural: The Liberal Penal Imagination
2. A New Deal for Prisons: The Politics of Reform in New York
Part II: Prison Lives and the World of the Reformatory
3. Adolescents Adrift: Young Men on the Road to Coxsackie
4. Against the Wall: Survival and Resistance at Coxsackie
5. Reform at Work: Ideas into Action at Coxsackie
6. A Conspiracy of Frustration: Coming Home
Part III: The Slow Death of Prison Reform in New York 1944–1977
7. The Frying Pan and the Fire: The Reformatory in Crisis, 1944–1963
8. Out of Time: Coxsackie and the End of the Reform Idea
9. Floodtide: Coxsackie and Post-Reformatory Prison Politics, 1963–1977
Conclusion: The Ghost of Prisons Future
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index
