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Looking beyond the walls

Several years ago, Robert David Ward and William Warren Rogers published a fine study of the post-Civil War prison system in Alabama. Entitled Convicts, coal and the Banner Mine tragedy, that book focused on the horrific treatment of prisoners caught up in the state’s convict lease system, and condemned to labor as slaves in the state’s coal mines, where 129 of them died in a mine explosion in 1911 (Ward and Rogers, 1987). In their latest work, Alabama’s response to the penitentiary movement, 1829–1865, Ward and Rogers shift their attention to Alabama’s antebellum penitentiary. Their research, they contend, exposes the ‘lack of continuity in Alabama prison affairs’ (p. xi) across the divide of the Civil War. ‘In motive and morality, in law and regulations, in control and organization, nothing of the antebellum [prison system] survived after the war’ they conclude (p. xi). While this view has important implications for debates in southern history, which frequently center on the degree of social transformation wrought by the Civil War, it also raises important questions about the trajectory of penal history in the South. Previously, most accounts of the antebellum southern penitentiary movement have suggested that it remained but a pale reflection of the reformative system of punishment that emerged in the northern states in the four decades before the Civil War (Hindus, 1980; Ayers, 1984; Friedman, 1993). But Ward and Rogers argue that in Alabama, at least until the late 1840s, the antebellum ‘moral crusade to bring about more humane treatment and a curative force to convicts’ (p. xi) was ‘an integral part of a national movement for prison reform’ (p. 1). Only with the