Runaway Slaves, Militant Abolitionists, and the Critique of American Prisons, 1830–60

This essay reveals the ways that runaways and abolitionists, through their critiques of American prisons in the decades prior to the American Civil War, collectively originated the ideas and practices of prison abolition. It began with fugitive slaves who named slavery the ‘prison house’. Runaways, and the most radical amongst abolitionists, many of whom served time for their activism, used fugitives’ carceral language to grasp the place of prisons within the greater ‘prison house’ of American slavery. They actively assisted others to escape this ‘prison house’. They engaged in projects of prison reform and abolition of capital punishment. They freed incarcerated runaways and abolitionists from jails, and resisted racist policing. In the process, these radicals became disenchanted with the modernizing reform project known as the ‘penitentiary’, in some cases calling for the abolition of prisons and police, alongside the abolition of slavery. In short, because the plantation and the penitentiary merged after the Civil War, abolitionist critiques of both provided the little-studied roots of contemporary prison-abolitionist thought.