Prison and Plantation : Crime , Justice , and Authority in Massachusetts and South

In Prison and Plantation, Michael Hindus, a historian turned lawyer, has attempted to explain the nature of crime, criminal justice, and punishment in nineteenth century America by comparing evidence gathered from Massachusetts and South Carolina. He uses such diverse sources as manuscript court records, state reports, legislative debates, memoirs, letters, and pamphlets to study prison reform, crime, vice, prostitution, poverty, delinquency, and dueling. He combines literary evidence, judicial opinions, and government reports and documents with statistical compilations of arrest, trial, and incarceration rates. The research and descriptions in this book are convincing and important. They tell us a great deal about how criminal justice systems worked in these two states in the nineteenth century. From this evidence we can better understand not only the nineteenth century, but our own era as well. For scholars and practitioners concerned with the problems of crime, society, and justice, this is an important and provocative book. Despite the importance of the evidence presented, Hindus has written a troublesome and ultimately unsatisfactory book. There are two important aspects of this book that must be addressed separately. First, Hindus's choice of South Carolina and Massachusetts for comparison is open to question. Second, Hindus has placed his evidence in an analytical framework that is unworkable and ultimately unpersuasive, and as a result his conclusions are undermined by the evidence he presents. This evidence is the major contribution of the book, but it must be discussed in the context of Hindus's comparison of South Carolina and Massachusetts, his analytical framework, and his resulting conclusions.