#  Fuller, Journalism, and Redemptive Prison Reform in New York 

 





Margaret Fuller chronicled the rise of modern American prisons and asylums while writing for the *New-York Daily Tribune*. Brigitte Bailey explores Fuller's journalism for the way it contained both the promise and contradictions of mid-nineteenth-century social reform.



 

April 15, 2026

 

 

By Brigitte Bailey | Edited by Russell C. Powell

In one of her first articles for the *New-York Daily Tribune* in 1844, Margaret Fuller reported on the founding meeting of the New York Prison Association, which organized reformers into what would become an influential force in penal theory and practice.[\[1\]](#_ftn1) She proceeded to write a series of articles on the city’s growing prisons and other disciplinary institutions; as Jeffrey Steele has said, these institutions created “a new kind of space,” one devoted to “the moral transformation of the nation’s collective ‘body.’”[\[2\]](#_ftn2)

In these columns, Fuller participated in an emerging genre, one in which both tourists and reporters described their visits to custodial institutions promising the regeneration of inmates: prisons, orphanages, almshouses, institutions for the disabled, and insane asylums.[\[3\]](#_ftn3) Writing in one of the recurrent periods in U.S. history when public intellectuals tried to think through the place of unfree institutions in a democratic society, Fuller—via Horace Greeley’s reformist newspaper—engaged her national audience in this discussion, using the immediacy of journalism to direct public attention to the wider moral and social implications of new reform institutions.[\[4\]](#_ftn3)

 ![Margaret Fuller](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2026-04/Fuller%20dag.jpg)

 

Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1810-1850)Historians emphasize the “invention” of the penitentiary and related institutions as a break from earlier modes of dealing with deviant or marginalized people; local governments did not invest in long-term incarceration or rehabilitation but punished criminals quickly and publicly—often with whippings or executions—and relieved the poor, orphaned, or insane in the homes of family or neighbors. Changes in social order, including immigration and urbanization, and elite anxiety about social control, together with Enlightenment theories of human perfectibility, created the total institutions most famously analyzed by Michel Foucault.[\[5\]](#_ftn4)

Using the penitentiary, a site for penitence and redemption, as a model for other institutions, nineteenth-century reformers advocated the “classification” of inmates by degree of crime or disability and created routines for inmates based on principles of “separation” from each other, obedience to prison officials, and productive labor—all practiced in a “corruption-free environment.” Prisons were to be “model and small-scale societ\[ies\].” As David Rothman summarizes the ambitions of early American penologists, “The penitentiary, … by its discovery … of proper principles of social organization, would serve as a model for the entire society.”[\[6\]](#_ftn5) The role the state was to play in shaping self-governing republican citizens was vital, and penal theory was astonishingly utopian: “penitentiaries were schools for liberty.”[\[7\]](#_ftn6)

Although penitentiaries were also theorized in Europe, the U.S. was the first to build modern prisons in any number. As the British writer Harriet Martineau noted in her 1832 essay, “Prison Discipline,” “America is … far before all other countries in this branch of her legislation… She is not unwilling … to have her penal system made the test of her political state.”[\[8\]](#_ftn7) Designers preached a form of environmental determination: “‘There are principles in architecture, by the observance of which great moral changes can be more easily produced.’”[\[9\]](#_ftn8) Architectural innovations included separate cells to prevent moral or physical contamination by other inmates.

This project had parallels with the era’s utopian communities, built in isolation from an apparently corrupt, chaotic, and increasingly urban society, communities whose construction peaked in the 1840s.[\[10\]](#_ftn9) Indeed, the rhetoric defining prison discipline echoes the evangelical exhortations of the Second Great Awakening to “come out” of “a secular world corrupted by market egotism”—to come out of the “great and wicked cities,” as the Shakers put it—and to join a community apart from the contaminated world of fluctuating economies and mobile identities.[\[11\]](#_ftn10)

The 1840s saw renewed reform efforts and an increasing involvement of women in prison reform and in writings about prisons. Examples include Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and Dorothea Dix. Women’s projects were often directed at women’s prisons; unlike men, women were not envisioned as potential citizens, and while they escaped the system of total reform practiced on men, they were often horrifically neglected. Reformers succeeded in having New York State erect the first women’s prison in 1839 at Sing Sing, which Fuller visited during the leadership of Eliza Farnham, who introduced both practical innovations and elements of reform ideology such as education and religious instruction.[\[12\]](#_ftn11)

Along with the account of her visit to the prison at Sing Sing, Fuller also published her reports of visits to the public institutions on Blackwell’s Island and to the private Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane. Her book reviews of prison and asylum reports imply that she read them as a significant genre which ought to be “made accessible to the public at large.”[\[13\]](#_ftn12) Fuller’s columns echo the discourse of rehabilitation and document gaps between theory and practice. She laments “the want of suitable … employment” and “instruction” for men at the Alms House, the lack of “classification” of inmates at the Penitentiary, and the overcrowding and lack of individual treatment at the public Asylum for the Insane.[\[14\]](#_ftn13)

 ![Bloomingdale Asylum](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/2026-04/Bloomingdale_0.jpg)

 

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane" New York Public Library Digital Collections.On the other hand, Fuller praises the reformist principles enacted at the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane. She sees the asylum’s success in drawing out its inmates’ potential as a microcosm of reformers’ efforts to redeem the nation and uses prophetic rhetoric to convey this vision to her *Tribune* readers:

> *We know no sign of the times more encouraging than the increasing … wisdom … as to the government of asylums for the insane and prisons. Whatever is learnt as to these forms of society is learnt for all. There is nothing that can be said of such government that must not be said, also, of the government of families, schools, and States.*[\[15\]](#_ftn14)

Fuller’s review of four reports on prisons and insane asylums, which she groups under the title “Prison Discipline,” because “advancement … in both these departments are … simultaneous,” enlists her readers on the side of the prison reform movement. Fuller sees its strategies of rehabilitation as harbingers of a coming era: “There are symptoms that mankind at large begin to have some sympathy with the divine love of Jesus, who redoubled his encouragements to the prodigal son instead of punishing him.”[\[16\]](#_ftn15) Similarly, she quotes from Farnham, the matron of the women’s prison at Sing Sing, who introduced bourgeois elements of character formation to her prisoners: books, music, and conversation.[\[17\]](#_ftn16) More remarkably, Fuller implicitly links the period’s two experiments in spatial and institutional reform—custodial institutions and utopian communities—by an emphasis not on inmate separation but on harmonious congregation.

Penal and custodial institutions function best, Fuller seems to believe, when they are at once sites of discipline and places of “association.” Many in her New York circle were influenced by the work of the French social reformer Charles Fourier and interested in remodeling national culture through communal experiments based on Fourier’s vision of voluntary association.[\[18\]](#_ftn17) Fuller was in dialogue especially with William Henry Channing, another New England Transcendentalist in New York, who promoted a Christianized version of Fourier’s communal projects, was a founder of the New York Prison Association, and accompanied her on visits to several institutions.[\[19\]](#_ftn18)

Fuller’s description of a visit to the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, administered by Pliny Earle, whose *Twenty-Fifth Annual Report* on the asylum she favorably reviewed, shows the implied teleology of the reform movement. Observing a St. Valentine’s Day dance, Fuller uses tropes of music and dancing to chart a prophetic trajectory. Under Dr. Earle’s care, inmates move “decently, and in order, each biding his time.” The care and music reinforce “the power of self-control”: “they regulate their steps to music \[and\] restrain their impatient impulses. The power which shall yet shape order from all disorder and turn ashes to beauty, as violets spring up from green graves, hath them also in its keeping.” Fuller moves easily across the permeable boundary between the discourses of discipline and of redemption; the reformer’s task, she says, is “to learn *how* that good may be hastened.”[\[20\]](#_ftn19)

The glimpse Fuller thus offers is of a future when the institution’s training toward a self-regulating individualism, “the emancipation of our wills \[and\] the development of individuality in us,” will be transmuted into the harmonious community prefigured by dances like the one at Bloomingdale. This dance combines “correction” (inmates literally dance to the institution’s tune) with self-expression; patients perform identities they have chosen—“the blue-stocking lady” or “the traveled Englishman”—and create their own steps: “One of the best things … was a dance improvised by two elderly women.”[\[21\]](#_ftn20) Fuller is here less interested in principles of classification, separation, or silence than in inmates’ connection and expression. This parallels her attention to the diaries of Sing Sing’s inmates, which informed her writing of *Woman in the Nineteenth Century* (1845).[\[22\]](#_ftn21)

   ![Eastern State Penitentiary Aerial](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2026-04/Eastern%20State%20aerial.jpg?itok=e1TxC2hv) 

 

Eastern State Penitentiary, lithograph by P.S: Duval and Co., 1855. A few years ago, while in Delaware researching urban depictions at the Winterthur Museum and Library, I drove to Philadelphia to visit the Eastern State Penitentiary, now a tourist attraction—a stunning example of theory embodied in stone, and in the 1830s, at the forefront of penal design. The panoptic structure, with cellblocks radiating like spokes from a central area, exemplified an extreme version of separation, as prisoners were originally confined alone in their cells. As evidenced by lithographs and other items of material culture I was studying at the Winterthur, this prison was a source of civic pride. In her scrapbook, local resident Emma Buckley Howard Edwards pasted a newspaper account of its history and reputation, up to 1841, that concluded: “at the present time the superiority of the system may be considered incontestable,” as it had been copied by other states and some European nations, and “the world is … indebted for the most perfect system of prison discipline the wisdom of man has ever produced” to “the Philadelphia Prison Society” and “the State of Pennsylvania.”

The Eastern State Penitentiary, now an educational site with exhibits and programs on the history of the criminal justice system, remains part of the national discussion on prisons. That discussion today ranges from rehabilitative successes to the damage of theories unleashed on incarcerated people (such as solitary confinement’s corrosive impact on mental health) to the profit motives fueling what Angela Davis has called “the prison industrial complex.”[\[23\]](#_ftn22) The structures and theories Fuller reported on in New York mark an early moment in U.S. penitential theory and practice, marked by swings between rehabilitation movements and the use of incarceration simply as punishment, revenue source, or warehousing.

As Steele notes, Fuller saw “popular journalism” as “an instrument of moral diagnosis and political sympathy,” a means of shaping what she called “‘public attention.’”[\[24\]](#_ftn23) Or, we could say, her columns attempt to focus a heightened “attention” in the sense Russell Powell uses the term in his inaugural essay in this series: on both individuals and systems, in a world of rising distractions, consumerism, and print media—a world that sounds quite a bit like ours.

  
**Brigitte Bailey** is Professor of English Emerita at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of *American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824-1862* (2018), has co-edited two collections of essays—*Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain* (2012) and *Margaret Fuller and Her Circles* (2013)—and edited a special issue of *Nineteenth-Century Prose* on Margaret Fuller (2015). She has recently co-edited, with Noelle Baker and Megan Marshall, the Library of America volume *Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings* (2025). Her current book project examines periodical depictions of metropolitan spaces, especially of New York, 1830-1860.

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[\[1\]](#_ftnref1) Larry E. Sullivan, *The Prison Reform Movement: Forlorn Hope* (New York: Twayne, 1990), 15-16.

[\[2\]](#_ftnref2) Jeffrey Steele, *Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology, and Mourning in Margaret Fuller’s Writings* (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 258-59.

[\[3\]](#_ftnref3) Janet Miron. *Prisons, Asylums, and the Public: Institutional Visiting in the Nineteenth Century* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).

[\[4\]](#_ftnref3) Tuchinsky, Adam. *Horace Greeley’s* New-York Tribune*: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor*. Cornell University Press, 2009.

[\[5\]](#_ftnref4) Michel Foucault, *Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison*, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).

[\[6\]](#_ftnref5) David J. Rothman, *The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic* (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1971), 71, 83, and 105.

[\[7\]](#_ftnref6) Mark E. Kann, *Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy: Liberty and Power in the Early American Republic* (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 7.

[\[8\]](#_ftnref7) Harriet Martineau, “Prison Discipline,” *Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology*, ed. Andrea Broomfield and Sally Mitchell  
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 48.

[\[9\]](#_ftnref8) *Thoughts on Prison Discipline* (Boston, 1839), 13. Cited in Rothman, *The Discovery of the Asylum*, 83.

[\[10\]](#_ftnref9) Dolores Hayden, *Seven American Utopias:The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975* (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976).

[\[11\]](#_ftnref10) Charles Sellers, *The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 157; Hayden, *Seven American Utopias*, 15.

[\[12\]](#_ftnref11) Nicole Hahn Rafter, *Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800-1935* (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 1985), 16-19.

[\[13\]](#_ftnref12) Margaret Fuller, *Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844-1846*, ed. Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), C271. (“C” refers to columns on the accompanying CD-ROM.)

[\[14\]](#_ftnref13) Ibid., “Our City Charities,” pp. 98-102.

[\[15\]](#_ftnref14) Ibid., “St. Valentine’s Day—Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane,” C102.

[\[16\]](#_ftnref15) Ibid., “Prison Discipline,” C249.

[\[17\]](#_ftnref16) Sullivan, *The Prison Reform Movement*, 15.

[\[18\]](#_ftnref17) See Joan Von Mehren, *Minerva and the Muse: A Life of* *Margaret Fuller* (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 224; and Charles Capper, *Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. The Public Years* (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 206.

[\[19\]](#_ftnref18) Steele, *Transfiguring America*, 231, 240-1.

[\[20\]](#_ftnref19) Fuller, “St. Valentine’s Day—Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane,” C102.

[\[21\]](#_ftnref20) Ibid.

[\[22\]](#_ftnref21) Megan Marshall, *Margaret Fuller: A New American Life* (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 218-19.

[\[23\]](#_ftnref22) Angela Y Davis, *Are Prisons Obsolete?* (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).

[\[24\]](#_ftnref23) Steele, *Transfiguring America*, 260.



 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Transcendentalism Initiative ](/programming-threads/transcendentalism-initiative)