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Professionalizing Prison: Primitive Professionalization and the Administrative Defense of Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829–1879

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Ashley T. Rubin
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Abstract

This article describes the process of “primitive professionalization”—the efforts of a small set of actors to claim professional status before their field has professionalized. Using a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1879), I examine the strategies by which one prison's administrators claimed status as professionals—those whose command of a specialized knowledge grants authority within their domain. Eastern's administrators deployed a series of evolving discursive strategies aimed at establishing themselves as professionals long before more formal, field-wide efforts to professionalize criminal justice. These strategies allowed Eastern's administrators to establish their professional status without traditional status markers of national networks, college degrees, or special training, which emerged later. Beyond illustrating a new pathway to professionalization, examining criminal justice professionalization at this early stage illuminates the early prison's precarious position and the internecine warfare among actors competing to control its meaning.

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Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , Winter 2018 , pp. 182 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2018 

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References

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