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This essay engages the work of sociologist George Herbert Mead and political theorist William E. Connolly, applying a reading of their understanding of the criminal other to the development of Illinois’ and South Carolina's penal systems at the turn of the nineteenth century. Despite an influx of European immigrants, Illinois politicians and prison officials fashioned an approach to corrections that relied on rehabilitation through assimilation as the core component of disciplining its convict population. In contrast to this approach, South Carolina fashioned a penology based upon the principle of exclusion, one that enshrined retribution over rehabilitation in the paradigm of punishment. The essay concludes by comparing the importance of racial and ethno-cultural politics in shaping regional and national debates over correctional policy and by examining the primary function race plays in explaining the current backlash against the rehabilitative ideal informing so much of contemporary penology.

Many attempts have been made to justify punishment by invoking the moral autonomy and dignity of those who are subject to it. Yet the most refined of these attempts have been informed by an awareness of paradox. For the practice of punishment, so closely linked to concepts of individual freedom, tends to degrade those subjected to it. And as a form of state action predicated on claims of moral or social solidarity, it often prevents inquiry into the ways that individual culpability coexists within broader political forms of responsibility. This essay explores the ways in which college in prison programs like the Bard Prison Initiative may intervene in this paradox of punishment.

In order to ensure that only tea which is pure and fit for human food shall pass into the country, all consignments are examined on importation. In the first place this examination is made by tea inspectors trained in the Laboratory and approved by the Treasury under the provisions of the Sale of Food and Drugs Act, 1875.