© Instructor's Text/Papers

Chapter 6

The Marble Cell

The Institutional Transformation of the Self

Robert A. Harsh

     On January 22, 1842, "Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady" arrived in Boston Harbor aboard the steam-packet Britannia to begin their Grand Tour of the New World. A worldwide celebrity author and lecturer, Dickens was likewise notorious for his acerbic social commentary and wry, sardonic humor. And though in his American Notes (1842) on his trip he often found much to ridicule in American frontier mores and manners, in Boston–cultural capital of America's High Enlightenment–he discovered much more to praise and envy.

No sooner had the English celebrity arrived than he was whisked off by Boston's cultural nobility on a round of show-and-tell visits to the city's most liberal-minded public institutions. Dickens, whose fictional characters often caricatured the worst effects of cruel social structure, had almost nothing but the highest praise for what he saw in Massachusetts. In fact, "Boz" found these self-consciously progressive institutions "as nearly perfect, as the most considerate wisdom, benevolence, and humanity, can make them. I never in my life was more affected by the contemplation of happiness, under circumstances of privation and bereavement, than in my visits to these establishments" (Dickens 56). Having witnessed the wonders worked in these model institutions, Dickens then goes on to remind his readers on both sides of the Atlantic that "a Public Charity is immeasurably better than a Private Foundation" in meeting the needs of the "destitute and afflicted" as "improvable creatures" (56).

Laura Bridgman–Howe's Liberal Heroine

Dicken's first host, at the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, was Asylum founder Samuel Gridley Howe, a Brown-educated physician, a combative Unitarian progressive, a devoted disciple and friend of educational reformer Horace Mann, and the guardian and celebrated savior of Laura Bridgman, whose privations following scarlet fever at age three included the nearly total loss of sight, hearing, speech, and even her sense of smell. Howe had seized on Laura's disabilities as the perfect condition for a bold experiment in liberal education, phrenological science, language acquisition, and innate religious sensitivity. And later, in a more troubled adolescence, Bridgman would become Howe's cause célèbre and ultimately disappointing exhibit in his battle with the orthodox, Calvinist vision of a fundamentally depraved human nature.

Two recent books have recovered the fascinating story of Bridgman and Howe: Ernest Freeberg's Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language and Elizabeth Gitter's The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl. Howe built Perkins as a progressive learning laboratory, and Laura Bridgman's breakthrough to intelligent thought and "speech" through her devoted teachers' lessons in finger spelling put her and Howe in a spotlight notoriety on a world stage. Visitors from around the world flocked to Perkins to observe Laura's miraculous transformation, to purchase her handicrafts, and to celebrate the seemingly limitless possibilities of progressive education, charitable institutions, and social reform.

Dickens eagerly joined this chorus of admirers following his tour of Perkins, proclaiming the transcendent innocence of the blind. "It is strange to watch the faces of the blind, and see how free they are from all concealment of what is passing in their thoughts; observing which, a man with eyes may blush to contemplate the mask he wears. ...every idea, as it arises within them, is expressed with the lightning's speed and nature's truth" (59). According to Gitter, Dickens in fact immortalized Laura Bridgman, since "to the extent she is remembered at all today, Laura is recalled as Dickens described her in American Notes: a 'fair young creature.' her face 'radiant with intelligence and pleasure,' her hair neatly braided 'by her own hand and bound about her head,' and her dress, 'arranged by herself, ...a pattern of neatness and simplicity'" (Gitter 123).

An archetypical, helpless Victorian innocent overcome and transformed in nature, Laura Bridgman is also the ultimate liberal heroine. "Dickens presented Laura's story as an inspirational tale of captivity and rescue. Without sight, hearing, or language, she had been 'built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning some good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened" [emphasis added] (123). In this sense Laura is nearly reincarnated by progressive education and institutional rehabilitation (although, as Gitter notes, Laura remains less than liberated from restrictive gender roles).

Clearly delighted by the uplifting and transforming effects of progressive institutions, Dickens goes on in American Notes to praise the University of Cambridge [Harvard] and the "almost imperceptible, but not less certain effect, wrought by this institution among the small community" and the "humanizing tastes and desires it has engendered" (Dickens 55). At the State Hospital he praises the empathetic care that is "a hundred times more efficacious than all the strait-waistcoats, fetters, and handcuffs” (61). Likewise, at the House of Industry for the poor, in the embrace of benevolent humanism "It is not assumed or taken for granted that being there they must be evil-doers and wicked people...." (62).

Even the state House of Correction seems to fairly glow with the warmth and transforming power of constructive charity. Alexis de Tocqueville on a similar landmark visit to America likewise marvels at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia and its early penitentiary structure as a model progressive institution combining redeeming labor and religious contemplation. Dickens, though questioning the American rule of silence, also has highest praise for the rehabilitating effects of honest inmate labor, just as the "juvenile offenders" at the Boylston School are gently led back to lawful, productive lives by redemptive industry. In fact, at Boylston Dickens seems to discover the perfect model of the institutional rehabilitation of the self.

The design and object of this Institution is to reclaim the youthful criminal by firm but kind and judicious treatment; to make his prison a place of purification and improvement, not of demoralisation and corruption; to impress upon him that there is but one path, and that one sober industry, which can ever lead him to happiness; to teach him how it may be trodden, if his footsteps have never yet been led that way; and to lure him back to it if they have strayed: in a word, to snatch him from destruction, and restore him to society a penitent and useful member [emphasis added] (64).

The Institutional Construction of the Self

Thus, in his reformist walk through the American social order, Dickens neatly articulates the substance of the liberal social vision that has persisted–however modified and diminished–into our post-modern era. In fact, in this perspective Dickens can be seen as the nineteenth-century apotheosis of what current social critic Cornel West might term the "liberal structuralist" (West 11). For Dickens and the liberal, even when humans are debased, oppressed, disabled, mentally ill, or criminally culpable, they are essentially "improvable" to better, more "abled" selves created by uplifting education, humane treatment, and an "industrious," progressive social order. From this perspective the self can be effectively and even miraculously reconstructed in an institutional community carefully designed both to mirror the best of the outside world and to restore those inside to their full, innate humanity. Thus, individual difficulties are more broadly envisioned as social problems.

The darker, more cynical side of this coin is the vision of those whom West might term the "conservative behaviorialists" (11-12) and whom Samuel Howe in the nineteenth century villainized as the orthodox, Calvinist regressives. These social and political conservatives instead contend that deviance and inequity are created in poor choices and individual weakness (original sin), and that integrity and success are conversely created in individual persistence, effort, and correctional/confessional piety.

From this perspective, while institutions can properly confine the criminal, treat the ill, and comfort and assist the disabled, the self is competitively constructed in a free-will Social Darwinism. Likewise, this scenario exactly reverses Dickens' elevation of progressive public policy, instead more often assigning rehabilitation to private charity and noblesse oblige. (In this context, industrialist Andrew Carnegie later offers an intriguing capitalist/privatist foil to Howe's, Mann's, and Dickens's reformist vision. However, in current political discourse these two polarities seem to have moved closer to a common, mutually diminished center in "compassionate conservatism" and President Bush-the-Younger's attempt to support religious charities with government funds, on the one hand, and liberal free-trade, globalized economic progressivism ironically often sustained with sweat-shop labor, on the other.)

Modern Models of Contending Philosophies

Walking tours through two present-day "correctional institutions" (jails, prisons, penitentiaries) provide striking examples of these two philosophies in action. In a spring 2002 honors seminar at Plattsburgh State University focusing on narratives of captivity and imprisonment, our curriculum included two trips to local New York prisons. We first visited Moriah Shock Correctional Facility for a self-identified progressive alternative to lock-down maximum security and then Clinton Correctional Facility, a classic penitentiary constructed about the time Dickens came to see America. (Ironically, the weather for each of the trips provided the typical Victorian light of an "inspiriting" spring day at Moriah and a raw, driving late snow storm on a dark day at Dannemora.)

The Moriah facility is set up as an eight-week "boot camp" rehabilitation for younger inmates who have committed non-violent offensives and who choose and are selected for this alternative to time in the "big house" penitentiaries. The camp is unfenced; inmates sleep in military-style barracks; and "correction officers" in this setting are instead "drill instructors." A typical inmate day includes clockwork meals, adult basic education classes, military drill, and institutional maintenance or public service manual labor on work crews in surrounding communities, all conducted in full military discipline. Like basic military training, the painstakingly controlled regimen is designed to first break down an inmate's old, offending self as the first step in the rehabilitation process Dickens witnessed in Boston, "restoring" him to society with a high-school education and ingrained self-discipline as a "useful and penitent" member of society.

The Moriah program is remarkable both for the meticulousness of its organization and the overarching belief that the institution can in fact create new selves through a positive, disciplined sense of community. Though in fact considerably less "secure" than other prisons, the camp is safer for both inmates and staff in the tightness of its routine and elaborate system of rules based in a well articulated philosophy of self-improvement reflected in slogans and rules of good conduct spelled out on walls in every common space. Clearly, the facilities, programs, and thoroughly structured rehabilitation philosophy at Moriah connect both inmates and staff in a single community. At the same time, this community–like Boston's earlier progressive institutions–is intentionally designed to create new selves, to socially construct a rehabilitated inmate. Guards experience much less stress in their participation in a more purposeful, hopeful institution; inmates feel safer knowing what to expect and what is expected of them; and communities positively appreciate inmate labor on public improvements. Dickens, I think, would have admired both its spirit and structure.

Ironically, the present-day "maximum security" Clinton Prison at its nineteenth-century inception promised the same rewards of a progressive penology. Built on the Auburn Model that combined solitary confinement in individual cells with common work spaces and reformative industrial, physical, and academic training, the prison closely replicates the architecture of the Massachusetts House of Correction that Dickens admired in Boston. In fact, in the 1960s and 1970s Clinton led the state system in the innovation of its alternative incarceration options, including in its adjacent annex building behavior modification programs for younger offenders, college education options both at the prison and at a state university in a nearby community, and a surviving confrontational therapy program for sex offenders at risk in the main prison partly staffed by inmate peer counselors.

But as prisons across the state became increasingly overcrowded and "double-bunked" in the wake of the get-tough drug laws imposed by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, reformist ideals gave way to safety concerns and progressive programs to locked-down security. (Ironically, Rockefeller was also a reform-minded institutionalist, at the same time creating the vast SUNY public university system and a different set of "marble cells" for the burgeoning state bureaucracy in a gleaming new government plaza in Albany.) The deadly inmate uprising at Attica Prison then provided a tragic denouement for progressive prison reform, so that the official rationale for the creation of the innovative shock facilities has been articulated as cost-saving penology rather than as humanitarian social policy. (The yearly cost to incarcerate an inmate in a New York maximum security prison is now near $40,000, about the cost of an undergraduate year at Harvard.)

Life within the twenty-first-century walls and cell blocks at Clinton for both inmates and guards is a tense and sometimes deadly balance between numbing boredom and swift violence. Safety resides in a lock-step routine that mostly confines inmates in their cells and divides the prison's interior into iron-gated security zones. Unlike Moriah, where inmate platoons were constantly visible at work, in class, or drilling on outdoor parade grounds, perhaps only twenty or thirty inmates were visible on our tour at Clinton, these mostly moving singly from assignment to assignment or working in small groups in prison industries. (The Moriah shock facility, by comparison, incorporates many of the program elements of the nineteenth-century Elmira Reformatory later dedicated to the imprisonment and improvement of younger inmates.)

Captive labor at New York prisons–like that observed by Dickens in Boston–now produces millions of dollars in goods for state agencies, including the inmate and guard clothing, office furniture, and license plates manufactured at Clinton. Missing, however, are the college night classes once provided at the prison by the local community college and state university. (At one time an inmate could earn a master of divinity degree at Sing-Sing prison.) Additional victims of get-tough public sentiment, federal Pell grants and state TAP grants for inmate higher education have been replaced by adult basic education classes, GED high-school degrees, and training in plumbing and electrical work at medium-security facilities. At the same time, a prison building boom in the 1980s and 1990s has added specialized alcohol and drug treatment facilities and a new, super-secure prison near Malone, New York.

With the restoration of the death penalty, Clinton Correctional Facility now houses the state's death row in a "max-max" Special Housing Unit. This cell block also confines violent inmates from other prisons in a 23-hour lock-down punctuated by an hour of exercise in prison-yard cages that separate inmates from each other and the rest of the prison population. A high-tech replication of the Quaker solitary confinement that was eventually abandoned when inmates went insane in the silence, this solitary exile within imprisonment makes no claims for either rehabilitation or even the semblance of a reformative correctional community. And though New York's prison overcrowding has now somewhat eased, the future of the nation's prisons seems mostly to lie down this bricks-and-iron road, with private prison contractors begging for business and bidding for cheap labor along the way.

Underlying this virtual collapse of progressive, reformist institutionalism is a social order ever more widely dividing the poor from the wealthy; the ghetto from the gated suburb; the highly educated professional from the increasingly displaced, laid-off, or out-sourced worker; the upwardly mobile from the street fighter and gang member. In fact, this new prison mentality very well mirrors the society that will pay almost anything to sustain it, even as Boston's progressive institutions mirrored much different civic ideals and a progressive consciousness in a much less diverse and distressed social order.

At Clinton one of the students asked a young officer conducting the tour about the recidivism rate and rehabilitation possibilities for the inmates. The answer was a bemused shrug at the apparent naïveté of the question along with the individualist rejoinder that inmates are responsible for reforming themselves if they choose to take advantage of what programs still exist within the prison walls. Dickens, Howe, and Mann would surely have shuddered to hear it. (The Department of Correctional Services mission statement aims to "offer inmates an opportunity to improve their employment potential and their ability to function in a non-criminal fashion.")

The Promise and Oppression of Total Institutions

Regressive though many of our current prisons may have become, the social reconstruction of the self even in progressive "total institutions" is not without its own limitations and liabilities. Having earlier served as the amazing living exhibit of Samuel Howe's triumph of progressive education, rehabilitation, and ennobling institutionalism, Laura Bridgman in her adolescent and adulthood at Perkins was a much more troubled soul.

Deprived of sexual and social maturation in the confining routine of the institution, Laura–by temperament determined and strong-willed–alternately lashed out at her teachers in anger and then at herself in destructive bouts of anorexia and withdrawal. Returning more often to spend time with her previously estranged family in New Hampshire, she underwent an evangelical religious conversion that deeply unsettled Howe's efforts to instead allow an inward sense of transcendental, pantheist divinity to emerge naturally in Laura's evolving personality and intelligence.

Clearly Laura had broken out of the institutional mold of her rehabilitated self, often to the chagrin of her reformist institutional foster parents and teachers and of Howe, her beloved guardian. And, sadly, the previously victorious Howe came to discover some common ground with his orthodox adversaries. Indeed,

...Howe had to confess that there were limits to what education could accomplishment when working with flawed human material. Experience had taught him that the "disturbing forces" which had marred Laura's character could never be entirely overcome. Her character, he conceded, would always be constricted by the "mental peculiarities" she had inherited. The great lesson to be learned from Laura's case, he now claimed, was that "natural dispositions, and tendencies, and peculiarities may never be eradicated or entirely changed" (Freeberg 204).

Although certainly not a full surrender to the biological theories of deviance or retributive punishment of earlier and later conservative social policy, Howe's retreat has nevertheless proven "good enough for government work" straight through to our twenty-first century.

Perhaps, as Erving Goffman eloquently argues in Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, total institutions–even the most self-consciously humane and progressive hospitals, schools, poorhouses, and prisons like those Dickens so admired in Boston–come with their own oppressions for those they confine and rehabilitate. And, from this perspective, the rehabilitated self in fact gives up its full autonomy and moral self-determination in the adjustment process of confinement. "Characteristically, the inmate is excluded from knowledge of the decisions taken regarding his fate" (Goffman 9).

Far from empowering a new self, extended confinement can in fact infantilize an adult inmate in a process of "'untraining' which renders him temporarily incapable of managing certain features of daily life on the outside, if and when he gets back to it" (13). In fact, new prison inmates are often welcomed with what Goffman terms a "degradation ceremony" in which they may be stripped naked, de-loused, and re-clothed in identical uniforms that mask their individualities and reflect their new–and clearly diminished–common status. And once labeled as deviant, all behavior is then "looped" back into the personality of the new, institutionalized self (37).

Just as inmates are first broken down with military discipline and punishment at the Moriah Shock facility, "total institutions disrupt or defile precisely those actions that in civil society have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his presence that he has some command over his world–that he is a person with 'adult' self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action" (43). So rather than replicating the outside society in a humane institutional, "inside" community, the inmates instead "find themselves developing mutual support and common counter-mores in opposition to a system that has forced them into intimacy and into a single, equalitarian community of fate" (56).

Enduring this primary loss of freedom, status, and outside identity, inmates must then invent a series of what Goffman terms "secondary adjustments" that "provide the inmate with important evidence that he is still his own man, with some control of his environment" (55). Thus an underground, contraband freedom is restored through Goffman's "make-dos"–private spaces invisible to institutional control, a token economy in cigarettes or sexual favors, re-empowerment through gang membership or religious affiliation, substitutions for missing amenities–that partially regain what confinement has destroyed. Therefore, the rehabilitated self–even a "model" inmate, student, or patient as remarkable as Laura Bridgman–is in fact morally diminished and even "converted" to the lesser person her self-proclaimed "benevolent" wardens want her to become. And since freedom ultimately depends on submissive proof of rehabilitation, the institutional reconstruction of the self is finally a "con game" through and through.

The ultimate challenge and proof of a truly humane, restorative institution is therefore its ability to replicate the progressive, affirmative values of the world outside in an equally healthy and hopeful community inside the walls. However, institutions instead often mirror the inequities and stress fractures of the societies that construct and maintain them, reinforcing the worst in both worlds. In this failure the liberal structuralist then sees individual deviance engendered in failed social structure and policy, while the conservative behaviorist instead blames the perpetrator for the poor behavior choices that in turn diminish the quality of the social order. And around it goes in ever costlier institutional construction and social control at the increasing expense of wasted human capital.

One progressive response to this institutional oppression is the movement to "de-institutionalize" inmates by incarcerating only the most dangerous, ill, or insane, thereby leaving healthier, less disturbed or disturbing individuals "mainstreamed" in the relative freedom of the outside world. But here again, this strategy presumes an outside community with more economic and educational opportunity, more equity and egalitarianism, more therapeutic potential than the institutional alternative.

Another variation on this liberal theme is the concern for "early intervention" for individual, family, or social problems reflected in Charles Dickens's, Horace Mann's, and Samuel Howe's strong faith in progressive education and rehabilitative social concern. Avoiding the gnawing diminishment of bad habits and influences, this intervention is promoted as both cost-efficient and public-spirited in its reinforcement of community health and civic wellness. Yet this approach likewise begs an activist government commitment to social welfare grounded in the progressive taxation so persistently opposed by the conservative behaviorists and politicians, who look to instead grow jobs and economic capital while shifting social costs to private charity and social control to more repressive public institutions.

Public Faith, Social Correction, and the Outside Self

The most recent effort to re-privatize social welfare is President's Bush's "faith-based initiative" in which the government would fund religious charities to provide social services previously institutionalized in federal and state government bureaucracies. Yet surely Howe's and Dickens's exuberant reformism was likewise a "faith-based initiative," even in Howe's self-conscious shift from a more orthodox to a less confessional religious ideology. Indeed, the history of American social welfare and penal institutions is itself nearly a church history, since so many philosophies of rehabilitation and treatment have emerged from religious ideals and ethics.

(From this perspective, the Puritan theocratic social order may have foreshadowed the current conservative behaviorist devotion to individual responsibility, less distant, smaller government, and local control. For example, Puritan orphans or homeless were arbitrarily placed by community elders in foster care with village families at the expense of the local government.)

Nineteenth-century Boston and America were persistently and explicitly Christian, and institutional reformism gained much of its energy and momentum from the evangelical crusade to convert, reform, and control an otherwise disorderly and sinful social order through the crusading power of voluntary reform associations and religious charities. (See Paul E. Johnson's A Shopkeepers' Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 for a superb articulation of the relationships of revivalism, political change, and social reform in early-nineteenth-century Rochester, New York.)

As this previously sacred public faith has emerged secularized, globalized, and capitalized in our twenty-first century, the ideology of total institutions seems to have again split two ways along a familiar fault: Liberal structuralists proclaim civil and constitutional rights, humane incarceration (without the death penalty), more egalitarian distribution of wealth and services, and societal wellness as primary but neglected governmental responsibilities. Conservative behaviorists pick up "traditional" religious and "family values" to argue for less government, laissez-faire deregulation, renewed school "standards," and individual responsibility enforceable with the death penalty. At the same time, much of the government, academic, and private service sectors has shifted to an entrepreneurial, corporate model in which even unemployed workers are conceptualized as "customers" of social services and the community and public as invested "stakeholders." (Thus the New York State Department of Correctional Services, apparently a productive corporation for inmates, staff, and taxpayers, in its mission statement seeks to "offer staff a variety of opportunities for career enrichment and advancement.")

Yet in this discordant clamor of contending ideologies and social treatment plans, surely government-run total institutions will not simply disappear into privatized charities or prisons, nor, in their current configurations, consistently provide adequate therapies and rehabilitation to "correct" the deviant, afflicted, and under-achieving. Indeed, "correction" implies a restoration to wholeness and right functioning, an elusive ideal in our increasingly frenetic pace of social change and dislocation. And so perhaps what we instead await is a social corollary of the ecologists' "ethic of care" that maximizes human potential, health, diversity, and social cohesion by "investing" more heavily and efficiently up front in child health, education, and preventive services; later on in more accessible and affordable health care and rehabilitation services; and continuously in social controls, law enforcement, and punishment that are both firm and fair. The social return on this political investment would include quality public services publicly funded and a more productive and rewarding community life that leaves fewer of us inside, angry, and lost, and more of us outside, healthy, and whole.

   Works Cited

de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1945.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes. [first American edition–Wilson and Company, 1842] limited edition cited here: Westvaco Corporation, 1970.

Freeberg, Ernest. Laura Bridgman: The First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language.   Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001

Gitter, Elisabeth. The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original   Deaf-Blind Girl. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.

Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961.

Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

 This essay reflects on the readings, field trips, class presentations, and conversations in a topical honors program seminar–Serving Time: Narratives of Captivity and Imprisonment–I taught at Plattsburgh State University in the spring 2002 semester. I am greatly indebted to and thankful for the energy, wit, and wisdom of the students in the seminar, whom I joined in this final paper assignment.