What is it about?
How do you prove you are a professional and people should trust your expertise when no one else in your field is claiming such expertise? This study examines the efforts of one group of prison administrators claiming professional status in the nineteenth century without the traditional accouterments of professionalization---higher education, specialized training, national societies, etc. Using a variety of verbal strategies, these administrators sought to convince others, including the state legislature, to defer to their expertise.
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Why is it important?
This study tells us how people can claim expertise without more formal markers of expertise, and how well these strategies work in the long run. It also illustrates how contentious the early prisons were as prison administrators, legislators, reformers, cultural critics, and judges all weighed in on what prison should look like and who, ultimately, should have control over them.
Perspectives
I sometimes describe this paper as containing "nineteenth-century style smackdowns." The language is polite, but some of the prison administrators' statements to the state legislature were as aggressive as one finds in this era. The heat of these struggles adds some color to history.
Ashley T Rubin
University of Hawaii at Mānoa
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Professionalizing Prison: Primitive Professionalization and the Administrative Defense of Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829–1879, Law & Social Inquiry, January 2018, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1111/lsi.12263.
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