Abstract
Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s continuing efforts in penal reform demonstrate the practical effect On the Penitentiary System had on French penal policy. Ferkaluk examines the French penal debates in which Tocqueville and Beaumont were participants, divided into eras marked by the republication of On the Penitentiary System in France (1833–1836, 1837–1845). She focuses specifically on interpreting two major changes to the revised editions of On the Penitentiary System: the substantive introduction added to the second edition and Tocqueville’s speech to the Chamber of Deputies in 1843 added to the third edition. These two documents reveal that On the Penitentiary System sparked a necessary national conversation in France on three key penal issues: the distinct difference between solitary confinement and silent work in common, the growth of houses of refuge for children, and the moderate balance between state and prisoner interests.
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Notes
- 1.
Other changes to each edition include the following: to the second edition, the authors added new explanatory footnotes throughout the text, an appendix entitled “Some notes from the English translator, Dr. Julius,” as well as an appendix containing extracts from both French and foreign journal reviews praising On the Penitentiary System. Both appendices added to the second edition were excised from the third edition, which instead included the “Report made by M. de Tocqueville in the name of the committee responsible for examining the bill on prisons (meeting of July 5, 1843).” The third edition also lacked appendices Nos. 9, 12, and 13, statistical notes 5–9 in No. 14, statistical notes 6–12 in No. 17, all of which were included in the first and second editions. Finally, less than 75 minor changes were made to the wording between all three editions.
- 2.
Before leaving for America, Tocqueville visited prisons at Versailles (August, 1830; a maison d’arrêt) and Poissy (September; a centre nationale). See: Brogan 2006, p. 143.
- 3.
The visit to Roquette would prove immensely useful in the decade following, since Roquette came to be used as an example of solitary confinement which produces profits from the labor of prisoners. See Beaumont’s second article in Le Siècle, re-published in Tocqueville 1984a, pp. 478–479.
- 4.
Indeed, throughout On the Penitentiary System there are indications that Tocqueville and Beaumont preferred the Auburn system, given their special praise of the Wethersfield prison that utilized the Auburn discipline of separation at night and common labor during the day and their inclusion of appendices on the costs of erecting the prison. See: Tocqueville 1984a, p. 208, 243.
- 5.
In the debate on Tocqueville’s 1843 bill held on April 26, 1844, Tocqueville again asserts that he has not blamed prisons alone for increased rates of crime and recidivism. Instead, he has also looked to the mores, beliefs, laws, and particular needs of the people. However, he argues that prisons play a significant role in the increase of crime and recidivism because they do not inspire sufficient terror of punishment for crime in the general society, and because they corrupt rather than morally reform the inmates. Tocqueville 1984b, p. 219.
- 6.
Whereas Drescher asserts that the issue of prison reform “first brought Tocqueville and Beaumont to an awareness of the insidious nature of the modern tendency toward centralization,” he subsequently argues that “they readily agreed to centralized administration in order to accomplish reforms in this area” (1968, p. 145). Drescher argues that Tocqueville eventually supported a complete centralization of power within the penitentiary which was necessary to support the internal desocialization project of penitentiaries. Hence, Drescher sees Tocqueville and Beaumont as performing a reversal on the issue of centralization. My argument here and in Chap. 3 deepens Drescher’s vision of Tocqueville’s shift on the issue of centralization. Tocqueville and Beaumont continued to support decentralization of the penal system within political society (outside of the penitentiary), while simultaneously acknowledging the need for centralized power within the penitentiary. Understanding that Tocqueville and Beaumont see a need for balance between modes of power in different social and political spheres helps us to understand that the “shift” does not occur on a level plane. In other words, the shift does not represent a reversal but a consistent appeal for moderate balance of centralization in one area and decentralization in another. Notably, the highly centralized internal authority structure of the penitentiary depended on a decentralized authority over penal reform in general; only by having an engaged local public would prisoners in solitary confinement have access to visiting ministers, Sunday School teachers, and so forth which was crucial to the project of reforming individuals. Thus, Drescher is only partially correct when he asserts a “reversal” of thought in terms of centralization. Finally, as I show here, Tocqueville and Beaumont did echo some of their fears of centralization in their work during the 1840s, contrary to Drescher’s claim (Drescher 1968, p. 149).
- 7.
Tocqueville 1984a, p. 127. Tocqueville and Beaumont specifically analyze Article 614 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
- 8.
In September and October 1843, Beaumont published a series of articles in Le Siècle in defense of Tocqueville’s report and the legislative bill, albeit he did so anonymously. The articles were fiercely criticized by Léon Faucher, to whom Tocqueville wrote a detailed refutation. See: Tocqueville 1984a, p. 29.
- 9.
In his speech defending the bill of 1843 to the Chamber of Deputies on April 26, 1844, Tocqueville asserts that “there is only one system. This single system consists in separating convicts from one another” (Tocqueville 1968, p. 74). Yet such separation can occur by either silence or walls.
- 10.
For a striking example of this problem, see Tocqueville’s interview with a prisoner in the Philadelphia penitentiary from October 1831 (Tocqueville 1984a, pp. 336–338).
- 11.
Tocqueville’s revised argument that solitary confinement promotes moral behavior also helps him to shift support toward deportation of criminals. Tocqueville later allowed for the prudence of deporting criminals after they spent 10–12 years in solitary confinement because such imprisonment would decrease the risk of creating an immoral colonial society (Forster 1991, pp. 143–144).
- 12.
Tocqueville emphasizes this point in his speech to the Chamber: “imprisonment of any kind creates susceptibility to insanity” (Tocqueville 1968, p. 86).
- 13.
Experience still confirms this fact, as Christopher Epps (Commissioner of Corrections for the State of Mississippi) testified before the Senate Judicial Committee’s hearing Reassessing Solitary Confinement: The Human Rights, Fiscal, and Public Safety Consequences (2012). Epps described a slow degeneration in the use of solitary confinement in the Mississippi Department of Corrections; whereas the punishment was intended to be used “for the most incorrigible and dangerous offenders” and only until they demonstrated good behavior, in practice it came to be used as a permanent holding place for gang members, the mentally ill, and disruptive prisoners.
- 14.
Notably, the bill was passed with the following revisions: the length of solitary confinement was reduced from 12 to 10 years, and rather than moving prisoners to the Auburn system following solitary confinement, they were to be transported outside of France (Pierson 1938, p. 713).
- 15.
However, note Tocqueville’s personal criticism of patronage in his review to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of M. R. Allier’s book Etudes sur le système pénitentiaire et les sociétés de patronage (1842) (Tocqueville 1968, pp. 90–97). Tocqueville argues that a system of governmental patronage (or, welfare) would “add very heavy and even unbearable obligations to those that already burden our citizens,” as well as erase efficacy by negating the principle of voluntarism in charity (1968, p. 95).
- 16.
Here I depart from Pierson’s criticism that Tocqueville and Beaumont were “narrow partisans” (1938, p. 716).
References
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Ferkaluk, E.K. (2018). Tocqueville’s Moderate Penal Reform Beyond 1832. In: Tocqueville’s Moderate Penal Reform. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75577-9_5
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