Whether it took the form of plantations in the South, penitentiaries in the North, or military camps in the West, the purpose of prison in early America was to contain the freed slave, the sinner, the indigenous, and the outlaw. Prison did not just incapacitate them but also constituted them as other. As Caleb Smith puts it, prison is “one of the primary sites through which the very idea of modern humanity is imagined and contested” in America.1 Stephen Hartnett elaborates that “debates about crime, violence, and punishment helped colonials and then Americans to focus their thinking” about “identity and character, gender and sexuality, class and capitalism, religion and modernity, race and slavery, and the Enlightenment and democracy.”2