America’s Fear of Losing Control:

The Origin of Systemic Inequality in Schools and Prisons

LEARN FROM YESTERDAY

It has become apparent to me that there are distinct parallels between the origin of

common schools and prisons during antebellum America. These similarities involve the reason,

purpose, and goals behind the existence of both systems, the structural changes that happened

during the time period, and the class and racial inequalities thereby created. As these institutions

originated in hopes of maintaining social order during a changing economy, it is apparent that

there were specific groups of people that society aimed to control through the various

institutions. In fact, some institutions that were designed to reform the larger society became

“dumping grounds for undesirables” (Kaestle, 1972).

Today, the links between schooling and incarceration are more apparent than ever.

Approximately 70 percent of state prisoners and 52 percent of all state and federal prisoners have

no high school diploma whereas only 15 percent of adults for the overall population do not have

a high school diploma (Meiner & Reyes, 2008). This striking fact portrays the link between low

levels of education, especially in racial minority groups and low socioeconomic classes, and

incarceration rates. Given the statistics, we see the huge connections between education,

particularly urban schools, and prisons. Streaming from certain structures in place, the systems of

discipline and control that exist in urban schools in particular feed students into prisons and are

designed to insure an endless stream of bodies into the current penitentiary system. More

commonly known as the school-to-prison pipeline, the educational system has been implicated as

a pathway in the structuring of the incarceration path, which appears to actively collect school-

aged youth and funnel them toward a future in prison (Meiners & Reyes, 2008).

Are there historical links that help explain this structure and connection between schools

and prisons and the inequalities that stem from them? What were some of the parallels in the

reformation and expansion of the two institutions during the 19th century and why did they

coincide during that time? What was the original purpose behind institutions and what structural

changes happened during the 19th century? By examining the historical origins of two extremely

important institutions in America that continue to thrive today, we can hopefully gain insight into

the modern day school and penitentiary system and some of the structural inequalities that are in

place today. Understanding the past is always a crucial part of helping us move forward.

THE NEED FOR CHANGE

In 18th century Colonial America, institutions were very different than in modern times.

Depending on the ideologies of a particular region, schools were structured to reflect that.

Common schools with compulsory attendance did not exist yet. In addition, jails were not used

to punish crime. In the 18th century, imprisonment was just a stage in the process, where

offenders were kept before judgment (Meskell, 1999; Morris & Rothman, 1995; Rothman,

1971). Institutions were places of last resort, and it was left up to families to care for the insane,

the poor, the unruly, and the helpless, who all had as integral a place as anyone other class in the

hierarchic order of the 18th century (Kaestle, 1972; Zuckerman, 1972). After 1870, our public

school system became more widely established and some radical changes to the structure of our

penitentiary system followed shortly after (Kaestle, 1972). Institutions became the preferred

solutions for the problems of poverty, crime, delinquency, and insanity (Rothman, 1971).

From the 18th century to 19th century, there was a firm conviction of the founding fathers

from the Jeffersonian settlement that educating children was important and necessary for the

stability and functioning of the state. This conviction, rested on Protestant ideologies, led to the

shaping of America’s nationality and the establishment and control of schools. Beginning as

charity schools with religious intentions, free schools were established to meet the educational

needs of poor children, hoping to educate the classes of children who were “wandering about the

streets, exposed to the influence of corrupt example” and “destitute of all moral and mental

culture” and did not belong to any religious society. Essentially, free public schooling originated

to try and teach children to all become good and moral members of society. In the 19th century,

this new ideal of the common school for children of all faiths began to spread throughout

America (Smith, 1967). This new ideal and the transition from charity schools to the

formalization of common schooling offered a new discourse about education and who was to

receive it (Richardson, 1994).

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the creation of national economic markets

and transportation systems, increased immigration, industrialization, and urbanization caused a

new crisis in the cities. Increasing poverty, crime, and insanity became more obvious, more

threatening, and there was a huge pressure on the schools to restore social order in the

communities. Leaders who perceived the poor urban families as an “insufficient or downright

pernicious moral influence” essentially called for the restructuring of schools and systems

(Kaestle, 1972). The Englightenment promised infinite improvement and demanded rational

solutions to the social problems that were coming about, and the antebellum urban school

transformed by the 1850s into a “regimented organization designed to teach order, sobriety,

frugality, and industry to children, especially the children of the poor and immigrants, who were

considered deviants from the native, middle-class culture” (Kaestle, 1972). In his book, The

Irony of Early School Reform, Michael Katz asserted that “popular education did not result from

democracy, rationalism, and humanitarianism, but rather from the desire of the middle class and

the professional educators to saddle the general community with a school system that would

serve their particular interests” (Kaestle, 1972). Katz saw the development of free, compulsory,

public schooling as “an engine of conformity, a means of maintaining the status quo, and an

index of national failure” as opposed to earlier historians who captured the school system as “the

bulwark of democracy, the key mechanism of opportunity and national greatness” (Kaestle,

1972).

Another rising institution that went through significant changes from the 18th to 19th

century was America’s penitentiary system. From 1777 to 1867, the broader social and economic

changes in the United States reveal some of the motives and reasons behind American prison

reform and the purpose of our penitentiary system as it exists today. Towards the end of the

1700s, colonial America had a huge population growth and its old ways for criminal punishment

became increasingly ineffective (Meskell, 1999; Colvin, 1997; Morris & Rothman, 1995).

Previously in colonial time, prisons were used for the confinement of political and religious

offenders and imprisonment was relatively an unusual method of punishing crime. Incarceration

was almost never used as a punishment and sanctions usually involved public ceremonies of

shaming and reintegration (Colvin, 1997). Contributing from Englightenment theorists and

religious groups like the Evangelicals the Quakers, this innovation began in the 18th century in

both Europe and America, as corporal punishment quickly transitioned to imprisonment. The

idea was that imprisonment should be the typical means of punishing crime, and this

imprisonment “should not be idleness but at hard labor” (Barnes, 1921). These groups set out to

convince societal leaders that corporal punishment was arbitrary and cruel and that imprisonment

at hard labor could be humane, reformative, and punitive replacements. The word penitentiary

comes from the ancient religious practice of “penitence as a way of absolving sin” (Colvin,

1997). In addition to religious beliefs, new migrants to urban areas and the increasing rates of

crime caused traditional punishments to appear less viable. The search for new alternatives from

reformers that might prove more effective took place and led to the invention of the penitentiary

(Colvin, 1997).

Not many historians would argue against the new strategy of imprisonment undoubtedly

being a response to the crisis of public order. Foucoult and Ignatieff both claim that the

significant investment in these institutional solutions happened because authorities believed they

were facing a “breakdown of a society of stable ranks and the emergence of a society of hostile

classes.” Mass imprisonment offered the strategic possibility of isolating the criminal class so

that it would not corrupt the industriousness of the working class (Ignatieff, 1981; Colvin, 1997).

The country’s understanding of deviant behavior in society led straight to the solution of the

penitentiary (Rothman, 1971). Instead of having the goals of deterrence, retribution,

rehabilitation, or public protection, punishment systems such as prisons is shaped from cultural

forces such as economic or social control (Colvin, 1997).

PARALLELS BETWEEN THE INSTITUTIONS OF SOCIAL ORDER

“Their institutions would not only reform the criminal, the insane, the poor, and the

delinquent, but would serve as a model of the well-ordered society” (Kaestle, 1972, p.220).

As America underwent broader changes with the economy, social mobility, and

industrialization, these changes caused a tremendous impact on societal attitudes towards

schooling, discipline and punishment. In hopes to develop a new basis of social discipline,

middle class Americans responded with enormous efforts to cope with the rapidly changing

society and the competitive and rising economy. The widely shared view was that the rise of

cities posed social problems of disorder and moral decay and that the only protection was

complete control and reformation. Although it was thought that corporal punishment actually

destroyed order, and repressed, rather than reformed, individuals, an “overriding desire to

preserve schoolroom order ultimately outweighed their misgivings about the rod” (Glenn, 1981).

In order to cope with the new type of society that emerged after industrialization in the early

1800s, reformation of the old institutions to build new asylums, workhouses, prisons, and

hospitals aimed to draw the “disobedient poor into a circle of asceticism, industriousness, and

obedience” (Ignatieff, 1981).

With this ever apparent need for institutions that helped maintain social order, the

overlapping purpose and goals of schools, asylums, and prisons became strikingly similar. The

institutionalization of reform efforts were designed to solve social problems that previously

could be solved by the community (Kaestle, 1972). Similar to the idea of common schools,

prisons in America “reflected a faith in public institutions for effecting social reform through

individual transformation” (Justice, 2000).

David J. Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum describes institutional solutions as

America’s response to deviance during the Jacksonian era. “Although Rothman does not deal

with schools… there are many parallels that will interest students in educational history”

(Kaestle, 1972). Rothman implies the similarities between public schools, asylums, etc. due to

fears of community (Rothman, 1971; Zuckerman, 1972). Keeping with an urban, industrial

order, Rothman realizes that the benefits of institutionalization were ultimately reserved for

deviants, dependents, and, by extension, schoolchildren, slaves on plantations, and women and

immigrants in families. (Rothman, 1971; Zuckerman, 1972). He discusses asylums emerging

from reformers’ fears for the stability of social order. His focus, which is widely criticized, aims

to examine this fear.

In a similar aspect, John G. Richardson argues that the coordinated system of common

schooling constructed historically from the three worlds of the common, delinquent, and special.

He draws parallels on common schools, reformatories, and insane asylums, and the founding of

these institutions during the same time. “The succession of these events reveal a relational

pattern, as when the founding dates for reformatories are paired against the dates of enacting

compulsory attendance” (Richardson, 1994). Richardson uses a case study with Massachusetts

and California that serves as evidence to the procedural ties between the reformatory and

common schooling. With the passage of compulsory attendance laws, Richardson draws on the

fact that children with physical or mental disabilities were exempt from attendance. In addition,

laws confirmed the authority to expel students who misbehaved or threatened the function of

schools. During the same time period, “the early 19th century turn to asylums was prompted by

the breakdown of traditional community mechanisms for the regulation of the poor… The

founding of the asylum and state hospital was a mutual accommodation of state and domestic

needs, the former meeting the challenge of the city and the latter the strategic adjustment of the

poor to the infirmity of the local community” (Richardson, 1994).

Richardson also makes the legal link between the reformatory and the common school

through the foundation case in 1838 of Ex Parte Crouse. He asserts that both were educational

places fulfilling community expectations affirmed in common law tradition and that the

motivation for compulsory education was the problem that came from the “laboring and

dependent classes.” Richardson ties the institutional parallels by linking the terms reform and

school and emphasizing the reform movement as educational as well as penal (Richardson,

1994).

Revisionists historically have agreed that the emergence of the modern prison simply

could not be understood apart from the parallel history of the other total institutions created in

this period—the lunatic asylum, the union workhouse, the juvenile reformatory and industrial

school, and the monitorial school. Aside from coming from the same reformers, these institutions

enforced a similar order of surveillance and control as well as the shared belief of enforcing hard

labor (Ignatieff, 1981). The school as one level and the penitentiary as the bottom level of a

social control network emerging to reinforce class relations in a capitalist society (Colvin, 1997).

ORIGIN OF SYSTEMIC RACIAL/CLASS INEQUALITY

Although it is recognized that the changes and reform to institutions such as the school

and penitentiary system originated from societal needs for order due to factors like

industrialization and the need for labor, it is important to note how these purposes and origins

helped create and lead the way for the unfortunate structural inequalities and racial and class

divides that continue to exist today. The expansion of compulsory education attendance and

common schools created by the anxiety about order was truly a concern specifically about the

influx of lower class children and children from diverse backgrounds. Horace Mann declared

corporal punishment occasionally necessary for these groups of children that were

“contaminated” by “vicious parental example and the corrupting influences of vile associates”

and that lower class “urchins” needed strict and punitive discipline in the classroom. Despite the

reformers’ optimistic outlook about moral reformation, they essentially believed that the children

from lower class backgrounds would remain “incorrigible” (Glenn, 1981).

In addition to the widespread view about lower social classes, racial discrimination was

also clearly evident during the birth of common schooling. In Schooling Citizens, Hilary Moss

describes white opposition to African American education in the early 1830s, coincidentally the

period of time of the birth of public education and rise of the common school. She draws on

these two things happened simultaneously by examining the antebellum cities of New Haven,

Baltimore, and Boston. As we know, common schools during the antebellum period were

“intended to provide children from disparate social, religious, and economic backgrounds with a

common set of values and experiences” and that schools “could teach children to become

Americans.” However, school reformers kept denying blacks access to public schooling and

“implicitly justified denying African Americans, as noncitizens, equal educational opportunity”

(Moss, 2009). In the antebellum South, racial inequality “took the most extreme form possible:

The state actively denied all forms of schooling, even informal means, to slaves.” African

Americans weren’t allowed to attend the few schools that existed, and then when establishment

of free, common schools for blacks did occur, state policy quickly established separate schools

for them. In the north, racial inequality existed as well, but through different mechanisms than in

the south. The common school movement, although promoted as an era of democracy,

empowered white children to claim citizenship, but also “reinforced white efforts to withhold

civil rights from African Americans” (Moss, 2009). In the North, racial inequality existed

through residential segregation, where blacks and whites ended up attending different schools

(de facto segregation). This residential segregation on class and ethnic lines in urban cities led to

the “increasing reliance on institutional solutions to deviance” (Kaestle, 1972). By examining the

historical period in which American common schools were formed, we are able to analyze and

acknowledge the mechanisms that make inequality in education possible (Walters, 2001).

Michael Katz claims that racism, meaning class and cultural bias, are an integral part of

the very structure of public education. Kaestle reaffirms that they are “not merely historically

associated and reinforcing, but inherently connected” (Kaestle, 1972).

Similarly, the other institutions, such as the early 19th century turn to asylums, as well as

the changes in American penal system, were also prompted due to the breakdown of community

mechanisms to regulate the nonlaboring poor, delinquent and dependent populations (Rothman,

1971; Richardson, 1994). In addition, the connection between lawbreaking and poverty has been

established by school and prison reformers since the beginning of the 19th century. Reformers

used this link as “proof that the poor were morally depraved.” In San Quentin prison, Warden

Ames asserted that the only “cure” for this class was enforced labor, and that the lack of any

skilled trade partly accounted for their criminal behavior (Justice, 2000). Marxist social control

theory highlights the use of the penal system as essential to the “reproduction of the unequal and

exploitative social relations of the capitalist system” (Ignatieff, 1981; Colvin, 1997). Although

there are many existing arguments formulated against this theory, continued evidence points

towards this very concept. In addition, it is important to note that penitentiaries were not as

widespread in the South before the Civil War. Instead, informal systems of justice continued to

prevail. “As long as slavery held the vast majority of the region’s poor under rigid control, the

South could afford a weak state, could afford to leave most white men alone, could afford to treat

even accused criminals with leniency” (Colvin, 1997, p.212). In the 1830s and 1840s, however, a

breakdown of traditional social control caused the building of penitentiaries as blacks soon

became a focus of white fear and hatred. The dismantling of slavery became a crisis in social

order for whites, and thus, the search for new forms of punishment that slowly came about in the

late 1880s to 1890s (Colvin, 1997). Soon, American prisons in the southern states, which were

75 percent blacks, arose from the concept of slavery. In fact, prisoners, often leased by states to

entrepreneurs, were exploited and treated worse than slaves (Morris & Rothman, 1995).

Whether race or socioeconomic status, the “problem” groups were often lumped together.

Rothman argues that the American view of the poor as a social problem led to the reform of

prisons to a custodial operation with mechanical restraints and harsh punishments to maintain

order. The poor, the criminal, the insane, and the delinquent, were all classes fit for this custodial

incarceration (Rothman, 1971). Unfortunately, this policy still remains with us today.

HOPE FOR TOMORROW

Given the purpose, goals, and structure of the origin of the institutions of schools and

prisons in America, it is evident that there is an interlocking relationship that streams into some

of the systems’ inequalities for the “lower” classes as well as minority and any other

marginalized groups. These similarities and inequalities have become more and more apparent

over time. From Foucault (1977) presenting the architectural similarities of schools and penal

institutions, to the modern day relationship between schools and the increasingly penal society

shaped by global capital and “the persistence of white supremacy,” (Meiners & Reyes, 2008)

these overarching structures are reflected in some of the many problems that reformers still aim

to solve today. If racism, class bias, and repressive morality are “integral” to the system, there

really is no possible reform and nothing short of a radical restructuring will truly give hope to

helping resolve some of these issues. In addition, this restructuring would be impossible without

first changing people’s attitudes (Kaestle, 1972). The one way to begin that is by first bringing

awareness. It has been shown throughout history, that while the intention of reform, specifically

in schools and prisons, may have always been to help, the result hasn’t always been a positive

one for all people. To begin at examining why can be a start to a better tomorrow.

References

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American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, 12(1), 35-60.

Colvin, Mark. (1997). Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs: Social Theory and the

History of Punishment in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Glenn, Myra. (1981). School Discipline and Punishment in Antebellum America. Journal of the

Early Republic, 1(4), 395-408.

Ignatieff, Michael. (1981). State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent

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1880-1920. History of Education Quarterly, 40(3), 279-301.

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Moss, Hilary. (2009). Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in

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