The following chapters seek to interpret the meaning of Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France to show the place the work holds in Tocqueville’s corpus and political thought.1 The fundamental questions that the book seeks to answer are whether we should study On the Penitentiary System and, if so, why. The work resulted in part from my translation of the first edition; this endeavor uncovered the theoretical merits of the work and sparked curiosity regarding the general lack of discussion of On the Penitentiary System among English-speaking scholars. Although the penal report was ostensibly the purpose of Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s famous journey to America, to date there have been only a handful of articles and book chapters that primarily explain some of the textual themes or purposes of On the Penitentiary System.2 Many scholars have argued that the authors’ interest in penal reform was a pretext, intended to boost their political careers and reputations more than anything else.3 Still, this argument does not account for Tocqueville’s continued work in reforming the French penal system throughout his political career, nor does it explain why Tocqueville and Beaumont chose to study penitentiaries (as opposed to any other social or political problem) in the first place.
Indeed, Tocqueville and Beaumont asked similar questions—should we study penitentiary systems, and why—when approaching the task of researching and writing On the Penitentiary System in 1832–1833. At the time, France faced a growing need to reform their prison system. When Tocqueville and Beaumont wrote their first edition, France had just begun to shift from using prisons as temporary holding places for criminals on their way to punishment (often death, mutilation, galley labor , or exile), to using imprisonment as the punishment itself.4 France’s penal system was divided into a national criminal justice system and departmental prisons . Within the national system, penal institutions included central prisons (those that housed prisoners serving sentences for longer than a year) and agricultural colonies . At the department level, there were maisons de justice, maisons d’arret, cantonal prisons , and police jails (O’Brien 1982, p. 3). Because these departmental prisons housed any person associated with a crime, witnesses and accused included, they were overcrowded and contributed to increasing recidivism . Most importantly, the use of bagnes , sites of forced labor on naval stockyards which relied heavily on corporal punishment , became the focus of needed reform (Forster 1991, pp. 137–8).
In the text of On the Penitentiary System, we see two specific penal questions stemming from the general problem of recidivism in the French criminal justice system. First, there is a need to compare and contrast the relative merits of three alternative policy solutions to the problem of recidivism: domestic agricultural colonies , penitentiaries, and foreign penal colonies . As will be shown, in choosing to promote penitentiaries as the primary means of penal reform , the authors seek to temper the risks that penal colonies pose in light of France’s geopolitical rivalry with Britain .5 Second, On the Penitentiary System contains a comparison of two penal disciplinary methods: The Auburn (New York) system of mandatory silent labor in common workrooms, and the Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) system of absolute solitary confinement . Both systems operated on the assumption that human nature can undergo significant moral reformation as the result of environment and education .6 Tocqueville and Beaumont evaluate these two penal disciplinary methods against a standard of human nature to determine their potential for moral reformation of the criminal. On the Penitentiary System is therefore the product of Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s official investigation on behalf of the French government, designed to elucidate whether a penitentiary system was the best penal remedy for rising criminal recidivism in France and, if so, which one of two primary American prison discipline systems (Philadelphia or Auburn) could be implemented to successfully reform French prisons and prisoners.
What unites Tocqueville’s thinking on penitentiaries as the best possible solution to recidivism, his approach to colonial imperialism (penal colonization in particular), and his arguments on the potential moral reformation of criminals is his underlying concern to pursue moderation between institutional and theoretical extremes. Tocqueville holds a moderate view of the potential and limits of human nature , especially when evaluating methods to reform criminals. Further, On the Penitentiary System acts as a tool of moderation between three penal alternatives available to France in the nineteenth century. In both thinking moderately and advocating for moderate political action, Tocqueville’s On the Penitentiary System renews an emphasis on the importance of civic engagement and the balance between philosophy and praxis. On the Penitentiary System teaches us that liberalism works best when its statesmen work moderately. Hence, Tocqueville’s study on crime and punishment yields fruitful answers to questions regarding political nuances in nineteenth-century French penal reform and Tocqueville as a political thinker and actor.
Is the Report Practical or Philosophical?
At first glance, On the Penitentiary System appears to be merely a systematic report on the practical application of the American penitentiary system to the French criminal justice structure, rather than an exercise in political or intellectual moderation.7 The details of the report resulted from a nine-month study of American penitentiaries. Tocqueville and Beaumont arrived in New York on May 10, 1831, and began their return journey to France on February 20, 1832. During that time, they spent 10 days at both Sing Sing and Auburn (New York penitentiaries), 8 days at the New York House of Refuge , and 12 days at the Cherry Hill Penitentiary (in Philadelphia).8 Although the pair only stayed a short time in the United States , they were aided by many distinguished American citizens who gave them access to explore the penitentiaries and provided documents for them to take back to France.9 Throughout the report, Tocqueville and Beaumont provide a seemingly balanced, impartial record of facts and a multitude of statistics .10 Indeed, the original study published in 1833 begins with a list of six volumes of primary sources, which Tocqueville and Beaumont deposited at the Ministry of Commerce and Public Works to accompany their official report. A large portion of the text is devoted to the comparative question of how to equate data and systems between two countries. Additionally, much of the text is devoted to explaining the differences between two main penitentiary systems in America, the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems, without necessarily endorsing one over the other. The overall tone appears to be one of detached analysis.11
Furthermore, the organizational structure of On the Penitentiary Syste...