Portending Mass Incarceration: Race, Modernity, and Rehabilitation at Eastern State Penitentiary After WWII
Berger, Rachel
In its final decades of operation, a range of actors from scholars and prison reformers to prison administrators, staff, and incarcerated persons debated the rehabilitation program at Eastern State Penitentiary. Drawing on policy reports, archives of an inmate-produced magazine, and new oral histories, this paper shows that race and ideas of “modernity” influenced each group’s arguments and shaped experiences of rehabilitation for staff and inmates. Both race and modernity are essential to understanding how the American postwar period connects to the period of racialized mass incarceration which followed it.
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