Tennessee built its first state penitentiary in Nashville in 1830 on Sixteenth and Church Streets on land that is now a downtown parking lot. Revisions in the criminal code made many offenses punishable by imprisonment instead of corporal or capital punishment, and the convict population grew steadily. Continuing concern was expressed by the General Assembly that the penitentiary be self-supporting, and much effort was expended at all levels of government to accomplish that end. This study covers the history of approximately the first one hundred years of the Tennessee State Prison System. It begins with an overview of the criminal justice system in the state prior to the building of the state's first penitentiary, details the history of the penitentiary system, and concludes with a summary of the first one hundred years. Public opinion as gleaned from the state's major daily newspapers, political opinion as determined from the records of the Tennessee General Assembly and addresses by the state's governors, and organizational history as determined by official reports and records of the various management entities that have controlled Tennessee prisons are all intertwined in this history. Individual chapters place particular emphasis on convict

The Keepers and the Kept: The First Hundred Years of the Tennessee State Prison System, 1830-1930. (Volumes I and II).

THE FISCAL CRISES AFFLICTING THE STATE GOVERNMENT OF ALABAMA in recent years have been felt particularly hard in the state’s prison system.1 Faced with serious overcrowding of inmates and a lack of staff at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, located in Wetumpka in Elmore County in the middle of the state just north of Montgomery, the state began shipping female convicts to private prisons in Louisiana in 2003.2 Four years later, the Alabama Department of Corrections was able to bring back all of these women, thanks to the renovation of a second, smaller women’s prison, the Montgomery Women’s Facility.3 While overcrowding, understaffing, and underfunding are not unique to Tutwiler or the male prisons of Alabama, they are problems and issues that have helped determine the history of the Julia Tutwiler Prison. Since the incarceration rate of women is now increasing faster than that of men in the national prison population, an examination and analysis of the history of the women’s prison of T I M D O D G E

Good Intentions, Disappointing Results: A History of the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women

With the economics of racism of the 1930s and 1950s American South in mind, our essay explores the relationship between the act of writing and institutional penology. Taking an obscure, but visceral autobiographical account by Paterson and Conrad (Scottsboro Boy, Garden City Doubleday, 1950), we examine how discipline, punishment, and institutional identity emerge out of publishing, or, as Foucault put it, “the power of writing.” Narratives of delinquency born out of a racialized penal economy tend to resist attempts to tame the criminal, making institutional survival a productive discourse, and its articulation, a unique revolutionary act.

To Discipline and Publish: Scottsboro and Narratives of Delinquency

More than two centuries ago, colonial Connecticut was experimenting with a prison-like regime when it experienced the first rrprison riot" in what is now the United States (McKay, 1983) Later in the 17th century, the inmates of Newgate Penitentiary in New York rioted to protest overcrowding, just three years after that prison opened Since the invention of the penitentiary, numerous riots, revolts, and insurrections have taken place in American prisons (Heaps, 1970) There exists a rich history of the precipitating "causes" of and proposed solutions to prison riots (American Correctional Association, 1981), but few efforts have been made to link these ideas together into systematic theory (Alpert, 1977; Garson, 1972a and 1972b; Huff, 1983) This article seeks to address that deficiency by extending to prison riots a theory which has been applied to social revolutions?ie, "rising expectations" theory Finally, we identify some of the organizational and system dynamics which can be affected by the growing federal court intervention in the management of prisons, and we emphasize the importance of improving judicial understanding of prisons as complex organizations Our general focus is on court-ordered prison reform, with specific attention to the most sweeping prison conditions case in Ameri can history, Ruiz v Estelle (1980)

Ray A. March

Papers

Alabama Bound: Forty-Five Years inside a Prison System