Hard Time: Reforming the Penitentiary in Nineteenth-Century Canada

next, reformers condemned the failures of their predecessors, assigning blame and formulating solutions that promised to move the penitentiary in new directions.Previous interpretations of the nineteenth-century penitentiary have chronicled the "failure" of reform but have for the most part neglected the broader historical impact of reform movements on the evolution of the penitentiary.3 At the heart of the penitentiary reform project lay a contradiction: while reform was flawed, it also moved the penitentiary in new directions that made it less miserable and debasing.It is indisputable that, as the nineteenth century progressed, fewer prisoners died of untreated illnesses, fewer were brutally whipped for breaking the rules, and more emphasis was placed on education, religious instruction, and industrial training in an attempt to reform and rehabilitate prisoners.The penitentiary reform movement contributed to such changes.At the same time that conditions improved, however, the institution also expanded its practices of physical and moral surveillance and its exercise of control over the lives of prisoners.These developments were facilitated by the growing concern among reformers about the individual needs and moral condition of inmates.This ambiguity of outcome complicates our efforts to judge reform as a social movement.What should we use as a measure of success or failure?Seeing reform merely as a project of reinvention cannot speak to the larger and ongoing failure of the penitentiary to reduce crime, to transform individuals, and, in general, to reinforce faith in modern, enlightened solutions.Neither can such a view fully address how reform ideas themselves were often subverted in ways that sustained larger structures of domination and, in effect, made the institution itself one of the pillars of class control, racism, and gender inequality.In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault was the first to suggest that reform was a continuous condition of the modern penitentiary rather than merely a response to its failures.I use this perspective on reform as my point of entry into the study of the penitentiary to suggest that the discourse of reform was a constant influence on the direction in which the prison developed.Canadian prison reform was influenced by internationally renowned figures such as England's John

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