The Reason Prison Essay Experiment

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One of the stranger books in the English language is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Not Erewhon the upscale Los Angeles grocery chain, whose devotees happily pay the GDP of a small nation for a smoothie, but Erewhon the 1872 satirical novel, whose title is “nowhere” spelled (almost) backward.

The book’s current claim to fame is that Frank Herbert borrowed Butler’s name for the anti-machine Butlerian Jihad in the Dune universe. But Butler’s original target wasn’t artificial intelligence. It was human foibles.

In Butler’s imaginary country, illness is treated as a crime while crime is treated as an illness. A man who contracts tuberculosis is prosecuted for his moral failure. An embezzler or a sufferer from a “severe fit of immorality,” meanwhile, receives sympathy and treatment for his unfortunate condition. Butler wasn’t arguing that our own society had the categories backward so much as asking why we felt so certain we had them right. Erewhon forces readers to consider the ways every civilization constructs elaborate moral and legal systems that seem perfectly obvious to the people living inside them and deeply bizarre to everyone else.

That perspective is useful to keep in mind while reading C.J. Ciaramella’s extraordinary 14,000-word history of American prisons, the centerpiece of this special issue of Reason.

The modern prison is, in many respects, an American invention: a product of Enlightenment optimism, Protestant moralism, and republican confidence that carefully designed institutions could shape better citizens. As Ciaramella writes, the progenitors of the penitentiary hoped to use “architecture and discipline to mold convicts into productive citizens while avoiding the sadism and spectacle that typified criminal justice in Europe.” But one of America’s most idealistic institutions has become one of its cruelest.

Ciaramella, who has been reporting on criminal justice for over a decade, begins at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, whose forbidding stone walls so disturbed the Marquis de Lafayette when he toured it two centuries ago that he reportedly asked, “What! Have you Bastilles in this country?” Yet those walls enclosed what reformers sincerely believed was a humanitarian project. Prisons, historian Ashley Rubin tells Ciaramella, were supposed to be “republican machines.” Crime threatened the virtue on which the new republic depended; the penitentiary would manufacture virtuous citizens.

Every generation confidently announces that it has finally discovered the proper philosophy of punishment. Every generation initiates institutions that drift, with horrifying speed, toward brutality, neglect, or outright sadism. Even Butler’s Erewhon has a prison reform movement. “Only a few years before my arrival in the country,” the narrator reports, “the treatment of all convicted invalids had been much more barbarous than now,” with the sick being sent to work camps to die without treatment. Now, he added, a more “sensitive age” was dawning.

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“The American Prison Experiment” is also an experiment for Reason. The longest piece we’ve published in at least 30 years, it is very nearly a book. The worst injustices are often hiding in plain sight—slavery, discrimination, coverture, conscription—and taken for granted as unchangeable pillars of society. Ciaramella’s essay is an attempt to make prisons and their inmates fully visible, as well as a genuine attempt to understand and steelman the motivations of the system’s creators.

New York’s Auburn prison, “from which so happy a result had been anticipated, was fatal to the greater part of the convicts,” reported 1831 visitors Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont. The theory was that it would be best for everyone if inmates lived alone and in silence. Instead, “this absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man.”

Ciaramella traces the evolution from public cruelty to hidden cruelty, and from overt physical abuse to systems of neglect so pervasive that, in the words of one federal judge examining Arizona’s prisons in 2022, “No legitimate humane system would operate in this manner.”

Erewhon asks readers to imagine a society whose assumptions are so strange that they become absurd. Ciaramella’s history performs a similar service. It reminds us that America’s prison system is not a natural feature of the landscape but a series of choices—about punishment, dignity, and what we believe people are capable of becoming.

The American prison has been reinvented repeatedly, sometimes for the worse, occasionally for the better, and almost always with more confidence than wisdom. Butler observed that “happily, common sense, though she is by nature the gentlest creature living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt to develop unexpected powers of resistance, and to send doctrinaires flying.”

Ciaramella’s remarkable essay suggests that 250 years of disappointment may finally have taught us enough to begin asking better questions—not because history bends inevitably toward progress, but because experience, if we’re willing to learn from it, still has something to teach.