[The Montana Professor 16.1, Fall 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Keith Edgerton
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004
181 pp., $22.50 pb
Daniel John Steward
Sociology
MSU-Bozeman
dsteward@scc.wisc.edu
Professor Edgerton's book is a social history of the penitentiary in Deer Lodge. Edgerton has an engaging style, and his book deserves to find at least two audiences--history buffs fascinated with the American West, and students of criminal-justice institutions. As a member of the second group, I am convinced that Edgerton's book would serve well as an introductory text for university courses on correctional institutions.
The early years of the Montana penitentiary unfold in response to a tradition of vigilante justice on the frontier. In chapter one, "The Majesty of the Law: Vigilantism and Western Prisons," Edgerton contrasts the informal justice of the lynch mob with the formal justice of the modern state, and he makes it personal. "Captain" Slade and George Dixon both experienced Montana justice, but much changed in the five years that separate those experiences. In the mid-1860s, Slade was hanged by a vigilance committee; by the early 1870s, Dixon became one of the handful of prisoners inaugurating the new territorial penitentiary in Deer Lodge.
Edgerton explores these intriguing cases at some length, illustrating the introduction of nineteenth-century criminal justice institutions to the frontier. That introduction sounds Weberian themes about the state's claim to a monopoly on legitimate violence (vigilante violence, no less than criminal violence, is delegitimated in this period), as well as the importance of formal legal structures for the development of capitalist economic institutions (legal discipline, including prison discipline, was integral to the industrialization of Montana and the extraction of her copper). But the Weberian "iron cage" has been overtaken, it seems, by the Foucauldian "panopticon," and it is Foucault that Edgerton evokes here more than any other social theorist. The spectacle of Slade's hanging suggests the torture of the regicide with which Discipline and Punish introduces the birth of the prison, and it stands in sharp contrast to the obscuring of Dixon, who fades away from the historical record once he has been incorporated in to the carceral.
Edgerton is not one to let any theory, however popular, dominate his narrative. In "Penitentiary on a Shoestring," we learn that the shift from the spectacle of punishment to the regimes of discipline did not unfold in the American West in quite the same way that it did in modern France. Establishing a territorial penitentiary in Montana, however vital to the mining interests of the region, was plagued both by gaps in communication between local elites and federal bureaucrats at the Departments of Interior and Justice, and by gaps in funding that made anything like Bentham's panopticon utterly impossible. Instead, those first cohorts of prisoners were greeted by a facility still very much under construction, offering a few cells but none of the other features we expect from the total institutions of a modern justice system: no centralized surveillance, no quarters for the guards, no kitchens or factories or hospital facilities, and no surrounding wall. While some of the missing pieces eventually fell into place, the Deer Lodge facility remained inadequate, with an inmate population well beyond its capacity.
In chapter three, "The Accursed Thing: The Territorial Penitentiary," we learn how the territorial administrators responded to overcrowding and budgetary pressures with a variety of programs designed to reduce the prison population: pardons, reductions in length of sentence, etc. There were also programs to extract economic value from the prison population that remained. This lower-class population of unskilled and semi-skilled labor constituted a sizable surplus army of the unemployed, and prison officials were eager to offer inmate labor to local individuals and businesses. Such programs, however, generated limited revenue, for the demand of the local economy could not absorb this surplus.
While the territorial authorities never made a profit on the Deer Lodge penitentiary, there were profits to be had by the entrepreneurial (or shall we say, "unscrupulous"?) official. In "No Warden More Efficient: Frank Conley," we get a taste of the false efficiencies offered by private prisons. No sooner did Montana acquire statehood than it divested itself of the budgetary and administrative headache that was Deer Lodge. Although the state retained title ("ownership" seems too strong a word here) to the fixed properties, it leased the facility to Frank Conley (and a partner) from 1890 to 1908, by which time Conley was sufficiently powerful in the area to be all but untouchable by formal superiors in Montana state government, and he continued to run things from within the administration until 1921. During his tenure, there was a growing demand for his labor force, and he certainly took advantage of the situation. Conley and company parlayed convict labor into substantial private fortunes, and this into social capital and political power. Going up against Conley was a risky proposition for anyone, as Governor Joseph M. Dixon learned the hard way.
However dirty, Conley's were big shoes to fill. In "Getting Tough on Crime: 1921 to the Present," the narrative loses steam, and the characters are not as interesting, but the old problems remain, and some new ones emerge. Witness, for example, the vulnerability of community-based corrections in Montana. The public outrage following a supervised outside meal for a few inmates in the mid-1990s provides interesting anecdotal evidence for a theme that Edgerton sounds repeatedly--that Montanans are "tough-on-crime"--but this leads me to some reservations regarding this text.
Important public policy issues are generally sketched rather than rigorously analyzed. Consider, for example, the claim that Montanans are tough on crime. Edgerton phrases it nicely: "Like many Americans, Montanans have always wanted their prisons to be tough places, even places where acceptable, measured violence is meted out, places of no return" (xii). But no survey data are offered to back this claim. Instead, Edgerton cites figures about Montana's per capita incarceration rate outstripping the national average in recent decades, and how Montana ranks much higher on its per capita incarceration rate (32nd) than on its per capita income (48th). This is entirely consistent with the general point being made, but as evidence of a statewide callousness towards prisoners this is rather circumstantial. The "tough on crime claim" resonates because it plays into red-state stereotypes, not because compelling evidence has been presented.
Elsewhere additional data are provided to support the claim, such as the occasional newspaper article or editorial, but these are all anecdotal; there is no formal content analysis of letters to editors in Montana papers. Surely the state is more heterogeneous than the tough-on-crime thesis suggests, and Edgerton concedes that public opinion actually vacillates between punishment and rehabilitation. While late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Progressive ideology may have fallen on deaf ears at Deer Lodge, it was voiced by Montanans.
This is only a reservation. No book of this size could possibly cover more than a century of social history and simultaneously address all of the related policy issues in a thorough and exhaustive manner. Professor Edgerton is clear about this from the outset: "This is not a study that attempts to analyze or measure in any objective or rigorous way the overall success of a prison..." (xiv). Instead, Edgerton hopes to disturb rural Montanans who "often take false comfort in their isolation" (xiv), to make them aware of the complex history of their prison system. How many of us in Montana are aware that there was a prison riot here in 1959? How many of us are aware that Montana already has an old history of private prisons? Too few, I (and Edgerton) suspect. And his Montana Justice goes a long way towards correcting our ignorance on such matters. But it doesn't go all the way, which leads to my next reservation.
Montana Justice gives short shrift to the recent history of power, punishment, and the penitentiary. Though this book purports to cover 140 years, it is primarily a history of the territorial penitentiary through the tenure of Warden Frank Conley, which ended in disgrace in 1921. Of the 108 pages that constitute the body of this text, fully 93 cover these first sixty years, and only 15 pages are devoted to the next eighty years. Even granting that these early years may deserve somewhat greater coverage, I cannot shake the sense that Edgerton has given us a teaser for most of the twentieth century. I would like to see a second work that restores some balance to the coverage of power, punishment, and the penitentiary in the history of Montana justice.
Where I see a shortcoming for a citizen-audience, I see an opportunity for a student-audience. For the most part, Edgerton's claims are well-documented, and the sources properly qualified and discussed throughout his endnotes. Both these notes and the extensive bibliography provide promising points of departure for those who would explore in more detail what has happened since 1921. And we are all better prepared to undertake such explorations after studying Edgerton's careful and thought-provoking narrative of the formative years. Other qualities of this text also render it valuable for instructional purposes.
First, the narrative is richly detailed, punctuated with episodes peopled by intriguing characters (e.g., the clever and corrupt Frank Conley), and sixteen pages of photographs and drawings illustrating key figures and places. There is nothing like plot and character to engage students.
Second, Edgerton includes scholarly details as well, illustrating for the student how academic texts are embedded in an ongoing discourse. Over twenty percent of this text is devoted to endnotes that review a substantial secondary literature and primary documentary sources. Edgerton draws not only upon the obvious governmental sources--Bureau of Justice Statistics, Congressional reports and hearings, Montana territorial and state records--but also on the reportage of over twenty Montana newspapers.
Third, Edgerton raises important social-policy issues and cultural themes throughout this work, questions that should disturb our students. He asks, for example: How can Montanans reconcile their tough-on-crime attitudes with their fiscal austerity? (Whether framed as prudence or penury, the history of corrections in Montana is a history of chronic resource insufficiency.) There are real stakes here, he insists, for "in impoverished states like Montana getting really tough on crime has served only to deplete state coffers and has contributed to a steady erosion of state funding in other critical areas, particularly in education, human services, and environmental protection" (xvii).
Such propositions should be critically examined and debated not only in Helena, but in classrooms across the state. Although Professor Edgerton has not given us the last word on such issues, his history of the first years of the penitentiary breathes life into these questions of Montana justice.
[The Montana Professor 16.1, Fall 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]