While scholars have documented Philadelphia’s late 18th and early 19th-century criminal justice innovations like the penitentiary and solitary confinement, there is a historiographical gap around the many white and Black activists, like W. E. B. Du Bois, who contested and contributed to the city’s carceral landscape in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a period that introduced a slate of novel criminal justice reform measures: women’s prisons, juvenile courts, and new probation and parole mechanisms. Bridging women’s and queer history, urban and social history, and histories of the carceral state, this dissertation rewrites the city’s Progressive-era historiography, revealing Philadelphia as a key hub of reform and resistance.In the chapters that follow, I explore the city’s 1913 Vice Commission; women’s benevolent and carceral surveillance projects; federal, private, and municipal undercover investigations; and the experiences of queer people under state surveillance. I argue that morals policing and anti-vice projects were sites of racialization and state-building, in which public-private partnerships emerged and police power expanded. Further, the maintenance of “normal” genders and “normal” sexualities was a state question, answered in part through policing, courtroom trials, and incarcerations. Throughout, using the methods of social history, I explore stories of resistance and rebellion on the part of policed and confined individuals.In Progressive-era Philadelphia, punitive and corrective reforms met with citizen and political obstinacy, and the chapters that follow reveal both growing carceral control but also defiance and interstices in state power. The Philadelphia that emerges here is not just a singular hub of top-down, elite-driven criminal justice intervention, but also a place of bottom-up opposition to the moralizing and normalizing effects of state power.
Anne Margaret Anderson (Thu,) studied this question.