The Carceral Colony: Prisons and the Making of America

FAIN: FEL-282579-22

Wendy Warren
Princeton University (Princeton, NJ 08540-5228)

Research and writing leading to a social history of imprisonment in colonial North America.

This book project describes the lived reality and social importance of prisons in colonial North America, thus making a crucial intervention into the growing field of critical prison studies. That field’s rich and generative work has been characterized by its modern slant; no extant scholarship (recent or old) on American imprisonment centers the pre-revolutionary period, meaning that, despite the urgency and growth of the field of carceral studies, nearly two hundred years of American prisons have been left relatively unexplored. This project does that work, using the tools of social history to uncover the colonial origins of one of the most striking social problems of twenty-first century America: the immense carceral state. The project asks readers to re-imagine the prison’s present-day existence as an inherited condition rather than a newly-invented implement of contemporary society, and to consider the implications of that revisioning.