In the Interest of the State: Production Politics in the Nineteenth Century Prison

During the nineteenth century, the jails, penitentiaries, and reformatories of America were “industrialized” under both public and private production regimes. Society-centered revisionist writing in both sociology and history has failed to explain adequately the appearance, consequence, and ultimate dismantling of these regimes. In this paper I offer an alternative, state-centered analysis which locates the political state within its interdependent relationship with the economic and normative spheres of society. My view underscores the role of state managers and agents as historical subjects whose actions have consequences for the structuring of the state apparatus.