Sentences of Silence: Order, Morality, and Labor in Auburn Penitentiary

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on American Incarceration, from the Early Republic to the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

What was the function of silence in the Auburn congregate system? Considerable scholarly attention has been given to the penological struggle between the congregate and separate models in the early 19th century, but much of this literature focuses on political or religious battles and the social significance of the rise of confinement. Some attention has been paid to the monastic-ascetic heritage of the silent system, but it is often not treated as the defining feature of Auburn. However, some contemporary observers would have disagreed – Tocqueville and Beaumont, for example, described silence as the core of the law in the penitentiary. Taking silence seriously allows a new reading of the penitentiary’s moral orientation towards labor, and of the type of society it embodied: silence was understood as a moral law logically prior to any reformative value that could be extracted from labor. The merger of asceticism and industrialism raises questions about the type of society envisioned by the penitentiary.

Author

• Chase Burton, University of California, Berkeley