Mark Kann's book is an astute, lucid, and valuable contribution to the critical analysis of the history of imprisonment and, most importantly, the relationships between liberty and punishment, the persistent gulf between those classified as deserving or undeserving, and the ideological assumptions and cultural practices regarding gender, race, and class that sustain those distinctions.
Kann's primary thesis—that since the earliest days of this nation, the valorization and denial of liberty have been inseparable—provides a framework for understanding historical continuity and current conditions. His task is to examine “how first-generation penal reformers, prison officials, and politicians legitimized the denial of liberty and perpetuation of patriarchal political power in liberal society” (p. 4). He presents a compelling account of the apparent contradiction and conundrum: How can a nation dedicated to freedom systematically deny it to so many?
The explanation is in the specificity: The revered liberty was from a particular form of patriarchy, that is, the domination of one group of privileged white men—American colonial leaders—by another group of privileged white men—British rulers. This liberty, gained through a brutal war, was never envisioned as universal liberty. The list of those deemed incapable and unworthy of full liberty and equal civil standing, “marginals” in Kann's narrative, was considerable and encompassing.
The author provides a poignant analysis of the ostensible impetus for exclusion: fear, writ large, that others would “abuse liberty by practicing vice, fomenting disorder, and defying law” (p. 2). His analysis is particularly compelling when he details the ways in which the right to liberty and, consequently, the likelihood and experience of imprisonment were gendered and raced. This is prominent not only in the original formation of prisons and punishment but also in the first and second generations of “reformers.”
Clearly, the subtext of Kann's exploration of “liberty and power in the early American republic” is the remarkable confluence between the historical and current distribution of liberty and imprisonment. This is extremely important for the excavation of the persistence of policies of mass imprisonment, despite all evidence of their resounding failure to achieve espoused goals. This trenchant work instructs us to look not only at the political currency associated with the rhetoric of law and order and this latest expression of a deeply carceral society but also at the assumptions of inequality at the very heart of the culture and the institutional and ideological structures that perpetuate them.
Kann provides a trenchant exposition of the mechanisms through which rehabilitative rhetoric—sustained by concealment of prison horrors—minimized critique, legitimized the deserving/undeserving divide, and preserved imprisonment as a perverse “adjunct to liberty” (p. 17). Further explication of the alternatives to prison would be welcome, but it is telling when he suggests that alternative responses to perceived abuses of liberty, alternatives such as voluntary associations employing persuasion and example, though seemingly more consonant with professed American ideals, are deemed unreliable and insufficient, and do not prevail.
The developments chronicled by Kann preclude the possibility that widespread liberty, uncoerced cooperation, and democratic efforts might replace patriarchy as the main source of public order. The coveted rhetoric of liberty runs headlong into unruliness. In the hands of the many, the proper liberty of the powerful becomes a messy liberty, too enlivened, too embodied, indulgent, and undisciplined: “[L]eading citizens and civic leaders expressed deep doubts that marginal people could be trusted to practice liberty without licentiousness” (p. 267). Disordered freedom is impermissible and punishable. One nation, indivisible, indeed! In Punishment, Prison, and Patriarchy, Mark Kann has given us an incisive analysis with far-reaching implications.
