The practice of solitary confinement was a core component of the new penitentiary system emerging in America in the early 1800s. Central to this correctional strategy was the belief that isolation from the world, and its sinful ways, would be the essential ingredient of the rehabilitative process. It was believed that if the individual was sufficiently isolated and left to the power of their own reflection and contemplation, they would recognize the error of their ways and, as a result, would refrain from any subsequent criminal behavior on their release from the penitentiary.

Ironically enough, the practice of solitary confinement was initially intended as a necessary replacement for the squalid conditions of jails commonly employed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (O’Donnell, 2014; Rothman, 2002; Scull, 2006). These institutions were often overcrowded, understaffed, and lacking in the most basic resources necessary to humanely address the material and psychological needs of the occupants whom they housed. The cramped quarters and unhygienic conditions often became a breeding ground for a variety of contagious diseases, which often made placement in such institutions literally fatal. Needless to say, the rehabilitative intent of such correctional confinement was rarely ever achieved. “Prisons were seen as incubators of a kind of disease that, unchecked, might act to deplete the community of God-fearing and law-abiding citizens who came into contact with prisoners, but also of a kind of vice that served to swell the ranks of the criminal classes (O’Donnell, 2014, p. 3).

In an attempt to respond to the contagion threat posed by the existing system of incarceration, reformers began to explore a strategy that could provide some protection to the social order relative to the contagion threat posed by criminality along with some legitimate hope for what Howard identified as a “moral reclamation” of the offending individual (O’Donnell, 2014). However, such a strategy would require that the very structure and praxis of such facilities be rethought.

Though the fact of incarceration was able to address the immediate challenge confronting the prison reform movement – that was, the isolation of the criminal from the “normalcy” of law-abiding social life – it would also need to address the obvious contagion threat that currently existed within the walls of the penitentiary.