Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons

The plight of prisoners of war (Pows) during the Civil War was horrible for soldiers on both sides. Prisoners suffered from poor living conditions, inadequate medical care, and substandard rations, resulting in thousands of deaths and making places such as Andersonville prison and Camp Chase synonyms of human misery. It is generally accepted that a contributing factor to the high Pow mortality rate was the ad hoc nature of how both the Union and the Confederacy administered their respective Pow camps. Unprepared for the scope of the war, both governments had to improvise the organization, construction, and operation of their camps as best they could as conditions evolved. Angela M. Zombek challenges this accepted perception, showing how Pow camps emulated the efforts of antebellum prison reformists not only to control the criminally inclined but also to correct their behavior. Zombek approaches the topic by perceiving the penal facilities not as Pow camps but as military prisons—an important distinction that allows the examination of diverse locations and practices. Examining several military prisons in the North and the South and comparing them to nearby state penitentiaries, Zombek demonstrates how the respective militaries adopted practices from civilian prisons to produce reformed and obedient soldiers. The resulting successes and failures in the wartime military prisons, therefore, often emulated similar results from civilian institutions. Both prison systems adopted some common traits, such as sites in remote locations away from urban areas, emphasis on religious guidance, physical punishment to correct errant behavior, and mandatory labor as a corrective practice and a means to sustain the facility. Both systems also, however, suffered many of the same shortcomings. Neither could handle the number of inmates that eventually appeared, possessed the experienced leaders and personnel to operate the facilities correctly, or received the financial means to provide for their inmates, much less achieve real behavioral reform

Criminology · Political science · Prison · Prisoners of war · Punishment (psychology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · World War II · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology