States of incarceration: Prisoners' rights and United States prison expansion after World War II.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation traces two mutually developing systems in United States history, one physical---the construction of a system of prisons and jails unrivaled throughout the world, and one more abstract---the legal and political web of ideas about what rights those incarcerated within these structures should be granted. Between 1871 when a Virginia court determined that a prison inmate was a mere "slave of the state" and a decision one hundred years later that prison conditions throughout the nation violated the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual punishment," there was a continual social, legal, and political effort to determine the fate of the convicted. The dissertation argues that the historical study of prisons in the United States reveals one of the paramount concerns of the 20 th century---the attempt to define the boundaries of freedom and of harm between the state and its citizens, and between its citizens and one other. How narratives of freedom and democracy have been able to co-exist with harsh punishment practices is one of the central preoccupations of this study.
Locating the origins of 20th century United States prison expansion in the New Deal era, the dissertation explores the ways these institutions operated as mediating forces between capital and labor. As prisons became integrated into the architecture of the state, the construction of scores of penal institutions pushed questions about how to account for the rights of the incarcerated to the forefront just as the existence of freedom and democracy within U.S. borders was heralded as a primary justification for U.S. involvement abroad. These contradictions are traced through an examination of narratives of punishment and rights which emerged in the post-1945 period. The pressure to define the rights of inmates gained momentum as prison populations increased and as crime continued to be a galvanizing issue. These efforts, the dissertation concludes, had multiple outcomes---in many ways they modernized the system of imprisonment even as they serve to authorize, however inadvertently, an extensive expansion of a criminal justice system which, based on population, grew to be among the most far-reaching in the world.