History Commons^™

Genealogy Behind Bars: An Update, Kathrine C. Aydelott

Faculty Publications

This brief essay is an update to “Genealogy Behind Bars: Professional Development Through Prisoner Requests: A Case Study,” in Genealogy and the Librarian: Perspectives on Research, Instruction, Outreach and Management, Carol Smallwood and Vera Gubnitskaia, eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018, which see for context.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Analyzing Inhumane Practices In Mississippi’S Correctional Institutions Due To Overcrowding, Understaffing, And Diminished Funding, Ariel A. Williams

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research is to examine the political, social, and economic factors which have led to inhumane conditions in Mississippi’s correctional facilities. Several methods were employed, including a comparison of the historical and current methods of funding, staffing, and rehabilitating prisoners based on literature reviews. State-sponsored reports from various departments and the legislature were analyzed to provide insight into budgetary restrictions and political will to allocate funds. Statistical surveys and data were reviewed to determine how overcrowding and understaffing negatively affect administrative capacity and prisoners’ mental and physical well-being. Ultimately, it may be concluded that Mississippi has high …

Challenging The Architecture: A Critical History Of The Wisconsin Prison System, Jacob Glicklich

Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation I explore the history of the Wisconsin prison system, with an emphasis on 1970 to 2019, Waupun Correctional Institution and Taycheedah Correctional Institution. From this study, I explore the nature of the Wisconsin system and how it has developed. Across this work I argue that the core priority for the WI Department of Corrections has been to maintain and expand its bureaucratic infrastructure, imposing limited recourse on prisoners, and maximizing its own disciplinary flexibility. There have been significant human costs to this system, and my work helps to document these costs, contextualize why they happened, and look …

Wilbur, Russell, Riley Kirk, Sam Penley

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

Russell Wilbur grew up in Waterville Maine. At the age of fifteen he dropped out of school and began working at a chicken plant and shining shoes. Russell faced a lot of hard times with his family for his mother was mentally ill, physically and mentally abusive and his siblings were all very homophobic. With a difficult childhood and unsupportive family Russel began to drink to cover up the pain of his childhood. During this time Russell began to sell drugs which resulted in him going to prison for a year. In 1975 Russel became clean and sober and began …

Momo, Momo, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

When Momo was only nine years old, he returned home to find his parents and his six sisters and four brothers had been killed in their own home. Sometime after that, he and his uncle left Somalia together to live in Yemen. He stayed in Yemen until he was sixteen, but when things became unsafe there, he moved to Libya. He had hoped to get on a boat in Libya to go somewhere for a new life, but he was thrown in prison instead. He was harassed and told to ask his family to send money so that he could …

Belle Isle, Point Lookout, The Press And The Government: The Press And Reality Of Civil War Prison Camps, Marlea S. Donaho

Theses and Dissertations

The study of Civil War prisons is relatively new within the broader study of the Civil War. What little study there is tends to focus on bigger prison camps. It has been established in the historiography that prisoners suffered across the divided nation, but it has not been ascertained how the decisions and policies of the government, as well as the role of the press in those decisions, effected the daily lives of Civil War prisoners. Belle Isle, a Confederate Prison, and Point Lookout, a Union prison, will be analyzed for key differences to provide a fuller picture of life …

Aisha, Aisha, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Aisha, a Syrian native, lived in Latakia with her Palestinian husband and six children. Their children were not allowed to attend school because of their Palestinian heritage. During the war, mortars and missiles hit the city, and Aisha's brother lost three children. Aisha's uncle in Jordan helped to smuggle their family into Turkey after they decided to escape.

They sailed to Greece with a boat carrying about 350 people. The ship's drivers abandoned it during the journey. To save the children on board, Aisha's husband steered the sinking ship. Her husband was arrested in Greece, and Aisha, who was five …

Walid & Rahima, Walid, Rahima, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Walid worked as a police officer inBaghlan County,Afghanistan, where hedid many operations with NATO and US forces. Walid was responsible for recordingoperations and distributing copies to the media. Being part of the operations was dangerous, and Walid lost many of his friendsto the Taliban.Theyevenskinned afriend for cooperating with the government. The violenceled him to say, “The terrorists have no religion.” The Taliban began entering homes and killing government officials,and paid assassinations happened in public. Walidknew he was in danger.After losing a dear friend, Walid knew then that he had lost all he was willing to lose.He fled to Pakistan where …

More Than Stone And Iron: Indigenous History And Incarceration In Canada, 1834-1996, Seth Adema

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This dissertation examines Indigenous (First Nation, Métis, and Inuit) history as played out in Canadian prisons. It argues that in the prison, processes of colonialism, decolonization, and neocolonialism took place simultaneously. In the nineteenth century, the prison was built as part of a network of colonial institutions and polices. It was imagined, designed, and built by representatives of the Canadian state alongside other colonial institutions, drawing on similar intellectual traditions. It maintains the imprint of this colonial origin. Prisons also became arenas for Indigenous cultural exchange and cultural creation, which in most cases subverted the logic of the prison. This …

Incentives To Incarcerate: Corporation Involvement In Prison Labor And The Privatization Of The Prison System, Alythea S. Morrell

Master's Projects and Capstones

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. The United States accounts for approximately 5% of the world’s population, yet it accounts for 25% of the world’s prisoners. Not only does the United States mercilessly incarcerate its own citizens, it disproportionately incarcerates African American and Latino men. This fact on its own is disturbing; however, when it is coupled with the fact that corporations profit from and lobby for an overly aggressive and ineffective criminal justice system, makes these statistics even more horrendous. Private prison companies such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group admit …

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

From England's Bridewell To America's Brides: Imprisoned Women, Shakespeare's Measure For Measure, And Empire, Alicia Meyer

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis examines the experience of largely single women in London’s house of correction, Bridewell Prison, and argues that Bridewell’s prisoners, and the nature of their crimes, reveal the state’s desire for dependent, sexually controlled, yet ultimately productive women. Scholars have largely neglected the place of early modern women’s imprisonment despite its pervasive presence in the everyday lives of common English women. By examining the historical and cultural implications of early modern women and prison, this thesis contends that women’s prisons were more than simply establishments of punishment and reform. A closer examination of Bridewell’s philosophy and practices shows how …

Please Don't Forget About Me: African American Women, Mississippi, And The History Of Crime And Punishment In Parchman Prison, 1890-1980, Telisha Dionne Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite the vast amount of research covering incarcerated men in the southern prison system from the beginning of the nineteenth century to present, the incarceration of women has gone almost unexamined. As the forgotten offender, historians, criminologist, and others interested in Mississippi carceral studies have failed to include a historical study that focuses on the incarceration of African American women in Mississippi. To date, there are two major historical works that explore Mississippi penology and its notorious Parchman Penitentiary. David Oshinsky’s, Worse Than Slavery and William Banks Taylor’s, Down on Parchman Farm, are the two pivotal historical works that examine …

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …

The Rule Of Three: Federal Courts And Prison Farms In The Post-Segregation South, Gregory Louis Richard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The following dissertation discusses the United States Federal Court judicial reform of prison farms in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. More specifically, it examines the judicial and legislative history of the historic reform that includes the role of the individual judges that presided over the years of legislation necessary to bring Constitutional reforms to the state prison systems of the South. The judges and states in this study include J. Henley Smith of Arkansas, William C. Keady of Mississippi, and E. Gordon West of Louisiana. The research outlines an important aspect of the court system and the struggle between states and …

Die Frauen, Der Strafvollzug, Und Der Staat: Incarceration And Ideology In Post-Wwii Germany, Andrea Moody Kozak

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how the material reality of Germany's women's prisons has been largely determined by their ideological foundations, and by the historical developments that have produced these ideologies. The German women's prison system is complex and imperfect, yet in many ways very progressive. It is the result of the last sixty years of tumultuous German history, and has been uniquely shaped by the capitalist and communist histories of the once-divided state. In its current state, it seems to have incorporated elements of a supposedly “rational” or individualistic conception of humanity as well as one that is relational and interdependent, …

Citizens And Criminals: Mass Incarceration, "Prison Neighbors," And Fear-Based Organizing In 1980s Rural Pennsylvania, Erika Arthur

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Throughout the 1980s, the Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC), a grassroots group of “prison neighbors,” organized for tighter security at the State Correctional Institution at Dallas (SCID), a medium security prison in northeast Pennsylvania. Motivated primarily by their fear of prisoner escapes, the CAC used the local media to raise awareness about security concerns and cooperated with the SCID administration to acquire state funding for projects at the prison that they believed would improve security. Their work coincided with the widespread proliferation of “tough on crime” rhetoric and policies, and the inauguration of the most intensive buildup of prisons ever witnessed …

Xrf And The Corrosion Environment At Camp Lawton: A Comprehensive Study Of The Archeological Microenvironment Of A Civil War Prison Camp, Amanda L. Morrow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Author's abstract: Handheld X Ray Fluorescence (XRF) technology is a new and emerging method in the field of archeology. This thesis discusses the results of XRF comparative analysis and comparative chemical analysis between a given ferrous metallic artifact's corrosion environment (the surrounding soil matrix) and the subsequent corrosion products formed on the artifact. The hypothesis is that the data will demonstrate a chemical correlation between the two. Iron and chlorine are the two major elements discussed in the study. The artifacts in the sample set have been collected from Camp Lawton (9JS1), a Confederate Prison for Union Soldiers located in …

An Incarcerated Republic : Prisoners, Reformers, And The Penitentiary In The United States, 1790-1860, Jonathan Nash

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The dissertation focuses on Pennsylvania and New York state prisons, and their inmates, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After the American War for Independence, politicians and reformers influenced by Christianity, Enlightenment philosophy, British prison reformers, and their personal experiences, replaced public punishments with incarceration at hard labor. Prisoners at the first Pennsylvania and New York state prisons maintained their pre-incarceration customs, formed communities of opposition, resisted confinement, and by the late 1810s and early 1820s, had largely taken control of the prisons. Reformers responded by formulating new architectural designs and stricter disciplinary regimens. At New York's antebellum …

A Final Visit To The Land Of My Birth Baselland, Switzerland June 1994, Ernest Albert Thurkauf

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Mother was exiled 30 years in America -- so I spent 30 days in Liestal, one for every year she was isolated and banished! My mind was constantly on such thoughts as I daily walked the streets of Liestal. Tired as I was, I never reached the point of exhaustion such as she did - - especially when she walked behind the harrows with a four-horse team [One Small Lifetime, page 79.] My 30 days for her 30 years was poor compensation for a devoted mother who almost died to bring me into the world! [One Small Lifetime, bottom of …

Letter From Attorney General Langer To P. B. Rognli Regarding T. H. Druen, November 12, 1919, William Langer

William Langer Papers

Letter dated November 12, 1919 from William Langer to P.B. Rognli responding to Rognli's letter of November 7, 1919 regarding a plea Rognli received from T.H. Druen. Langer has reviewed Druen's plea and there is no question in Langer's mind that Druen received absolute justice.

See also:

"A Plea to the Public and the Taxpayers of North Dakota for Justice" by Dr. T. H. Druen, Undated

Letter from P. B. Rognli to Attorney General Langer Regarding T. H. Druen, November 7, 1919

Letter from F. E. Packard for Attorney General Langer to P. B. Rognli Regarding T. H. Druen, November …

Letter From P. B. Rognli To Attorney General Langer Regarding T. H. Druen, November 7, 1919, P.B. Rognili

William Langer Papers

In this letter, dated November 7, 1919, from P. B. Rognli of Esmond, North Dakota (ND) to ND Attorney General William Langer, Rognli informs Langer of a "plea," which he encloses with this letter, that Rognli writes was handed to him by "a party who had received it from one of the prisoners at the Penitentiary." The plea in question is written by Dr. T. H. Druen, who claims to be the innocent victim of a conspiracy to frame him for the death of his young daughter, dreamed up by a Deputy States Attorney who, he claims, also seduced his …