Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons

By Patrick G Bass Morningside College

Civil War prison historiography has enjoyed a kind of renaissance over the past two decades, using new sources, new research methodologies, and new theoretical frameworks. Both of these works from Kent State University Press are among the efforts in these new directions. Angela Zombek’s monograph Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Mili- tary Prisons is the more ambitious of the two works under review. Zombek approaches her subjects in a complicated manner. The struc- ture proceeds from background and general overview through specific investigations to a Reconstruction postscript. The introduction sum- marizes the entire work. The first chapter provides a deep background analysis of theories of penology before and during the American Civil War, which reaches from the European Enlightenment to the Lieber Code of the early 1860s. The second chapter centers on the overall con- tinuities of practices of penology throughout the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The last full chapter (not the conclusion) looks at postwar legacies in terms of the triumph of continuity. The conclusion ably restates her findings.

The Annals of Iowa Volume 78 Number 2 (Spring 2019) pps. 211-213