Built in 1819, Auburn was the first of the congregant style of penitentiaries, a system that demanded total silence among the inmates as they labored in work gangs. Auburn’s first warden, Elam Lynds, regarded all inmates as cowards who needed to have their spirits broken before anything positive could be made of them, a pessimistic outlook often linked to his Calvinist upbringing.⁴ Auburn and its congregant style of imprisonment contrasted with the Quaker-designed Walnut Street Gaol in Philadelphia, which used solitary confinement as the means for penitent meditation that was supposed to reshape the disfigured soul. Auburn’s model was cheaper to run, and its potential for contributing to the state budget played no small role in the famous clause in the Thirteenth Amendment about slavery being retained only as a form of criminal punishment. Auburn was primarily a disciplinary machine, with Christian remediation serving as lubrication. Inmates were permitted a Bible in their cells. In 1839, reformers of the New York Prisons installed prison libraries, implemented Sabbath schooling, and restricted the use of flogging for discipline.⁵ The hope was that this environment would promote industry, piety, and respect for authority. Reformers sought broader public approval for their reforms by describing “success stories” of Christian redemption occurring behind bars.⁶ The proper calibration of punishment and Christian edification enabled once-hardened criminals to become followers of Jesus.

This transformative calibration of suffering and somber reflection has a long history in Christian theology. Given the right theological framework, the pain of imprisonment can be narrated as the proper precursor to renewed faithfulness. Paul was of course the foundational figure, rejoicing in his hardships and seeing imprisonment as an opportunity to spread the Gospel and imitate Christ’s humble obedience. Centuries later, Thomas More would take the long Western Christian inheritance on righteous, meaningful suffering and apply it to the topic of imprisonment with deliberate thoroughness. From the Tower of London, More writes that tribulation is

a thing that helpeth to purge our sins passed; a thing that preserveth us fro sin that else would come; a thing that causeth us set less by the world; a thing that exciteth us to draw more toward God, a thing that much minisheth our pains in purgatory; . . . the thing by which our Savior entered his own kingdom; the thing with which his apostles all followed him thither, . . . the thing without which no man can get to heaven.⁷

These words come from A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, a fictional series of conversations between a character named Anthony and his nephew Vincent, set in Hungary during the Ottoman invasion of the 1520s. After a discussion of other forms of tribulation, such as loss of worldly position, Anthony turns to imprisonment, proposing that they narrow their focus to the essence of imprisonment, which he defines as “the retaining of a man’s person, within the circuit of a certain space.”⁸ The spatial dimensions of this confinement, the treatment of the prisoners within, and everything else are “mere accidents.” Anthony goes on to argue that all humanity finds itself in this condition of imprisonment, because we are being held on the earth under a death sentence owing to the Fall. He goes so far as to name God as our “chief jailer,” a jailer whose broadest prison houses an infinity of smaller systems of confinement, understood at once as prisons in the common sense of the word, and also habits, vices, sickness, and ignorance. The chief jailer uses these “special prisons” to punish humans for specific faults, monitoring them all ceaselessly. If the whole world is humanity’s prison, then Anthony sees monastic orders like the Carthusians as actually benefiting from their narrow confinement.⁹ It is as if this form of religious life allows the members both to experience and to interpret the human condition as it is. The prison, by extension, serves both as a microcosm of divine providence and as a chief setting for drawing closer to Christ through tribulation, that special grace for God’s friends. Carceral suffering here is both necessary and good.

The idea of the cosmic prison, which More presents as a comfort to his readers, provides an apt transition to a consideration of Austin Reed’s memoir. More’s Anthony views all humans as prisoners of original sin, and, no matter how comfortable our world seems, it is simply here to house us until execution. Centuries later, in Reed’s antebellum memoir, we see how literally the world is becoming accommodated to the prison. But this prison system is not for everyone: it is designed for the lower classes, immigrants, and, as Reed’s case makes clear, people of color.

While More understood tribulations such as imprisonment as “a gracious gift of God: a gift that he specially gave his special friends,”¹⁰ Austin Reed’s sufferings represented, not a particular grace, but a generalized, life-long condition. Reed’s family was part of the African American middle-class community that had found its home in Rochester, New York. With the death of his father in 1828, the family became subject to intense economic pressures.¹¹ Reed begins his memoir with this death, and, in the words of Caleb Smith, editor of the published text, “it is as if he is tracing his origins to a scene of a disappearance, as if his life begins with the trauma of losing a figure of moral authority and economic self-determination.”¹² From this point of absence, which Reed says happened at age 6, he starts down the path to the penitentiary, engaging in petty larceny with his friends until he ends up forcibly apprenticed to Alan Ladd’s farm in Avon, New York, at age 8 or 10—his mother seems to have given up trying to discipline young Austin. Reed’s less-than-free condition on Ladd’s farm was a point of anxiety. It was at this same time that Solomon Northup would write of his own abduction and sale into slavery in Twelve Years a Slave. Life for African Americans in the North, though they were legally free, was extremely precarious. And even if chattel slavery was not the local order of racial control, Reed’s curriculum vitae shows the hallmarks of surveillance and confinement, from his forced apprenticeship with Ladd; to a long stint in the New York House of Refuge, a reformatory for juvenile delinquents; and, finally, to his multiple sentences to Auburn Prison. The cradle-to-prison-pipeline was operational in the 1840s and, then as now, it was premised upon the precarity and scrutiny of Black bodies.

After this jeremiad, Reed returns to his reader, promising to expose the different scenes, rituals, and mechanisms of the penitentiary: “Let me now take you politely by the hand and lead you through this dark and gloomy old castle.”¹⁷ The residues of fear of this dungeon yield to the pleasures of irony and exposé, a pleasure that is reinforced by his vision of divine judgment and destruction raining down upon the prison. Apocalypse is, of course, a revelatory gesture, an unveiling. Reed uses this apocalyptic pose to show the various techniques of punishment, from being flogged with the cat-o’-nine-tails, to the infamous showering baths, an early form of waterboarding. While the showering bath punishment, in particular, was deemed more humane than the lash, like the guillotine it became an emblem of modernized violence. But there were other cruel innovations, such as wearing the iron cap, the iron yoke, or being chained atop a barrel and forced to stand there until overwhelmed by pain and exhaustion. Reed enumerates his own experiences of these rituals of torture toward the end of his manuscript, as if to show that their enactment, rather than inmate rehabilitation, was the true end of the modern penitentiary. Scenes of Black suffering were familiar to the antebellum reading public,¹⁸ but such scenes were strictly Southern; Reed’s narrative blurs the Mason-Dixon line and foreshadows the ubiquity of racialized mass incarceration.

In Reed’s depiction of Auburn, spiritual redemption and social reintegration are impossible. I think Reed’s refusal to fit his experiences into the framework of tribulation and redemption make him unique and important vis-à-vis future Christian discourses on the prison. Jennifer Graber describes how antebellum writers who survived incarceration, like Horace Lane, James Brice, and Levi S. Burr, took the old, persistent Christian moral narrative of redemptive suffering and redeployed it to critique the moral and religious shortcomings of prisons such as Auburn, Newgate, and Sing Sing. These authors, previously incarcerated, themselves resist the neat plotting of a fall from grace, recognition of sin, penance, and spiritual transformation. “None of the extant narratives by former inmates contains a classic redemption story,” Graber writes.¹⁹ At the same time, they appear to retain some faith in the idea that just punishment could lead to redemptive suffering.²⁰ One such writer, Horace Lane, echoes Thomas More, when he writes that God “lay his chastening hand” on him in order to bless him later.²¹ By retaining the trope of redemptive suffering, these authors adopt an effective and time-honored rhetorical strategy of accusing the penitentiary of failing to live up to its own ideals. Reed could have made this move himself, but he goes further, refusing to speak of redemption, keeping his reader’s focus on scenes of cruelty and their destructive impact on the souls of prisoners. There is evidence that Reed would later become an itinerant temperance preacher and would allude to a Civil War battlefield conversion to Christianity.²¹ This claim is belied by Auburn’s records, yet it is striking that Reed declines to name the prison as the holy ground where his life was reclaimed by Christ.

The moment of the memoir where Reed categorically unveils the prison as a house of deformation instead of reformation comes after a violent scene in the prison mess hall. Reed refuses to obey the guards’ orders and threatens them with a knife when they attempt to enforce obedience. Subsequently, he is banished to his cell to reflect upon his misdeeds by reading scripture. Instead, Reed throws his Bible on the ground and tears it apart. Then he feels remorse, writing:

I entered the prison with my mother’s prayer printed upon my lips and my father’s blessings upon my head, endown with good reason and an ample store of good education, but you, ye dare face looking devils, have whip my mother’s prayers from my lips into curses, and beaten my father’s blessing from my head with a heavy hickory club, and took away from me all the good reason which God had endowed me with.²³

Immediately regretting his loss of control and the destruction of the “humble and precious old book,” Reed addresses the Bible itself, now in shreds at his feet: “humble old fellow, thou pled and counseled with me under the roof of that humble old cottage of my childhood and birth, and when I left the land of my nativity, thou followed me to a dark and gloomy prison, and now I have rendered the evil for good.”²⁴ Nevertheless this regret does not invalidate his central complaint: that the cruelties of this penal system of indentured servitude, juvenile reform, and now the penitentiary do not correct, but rather, further corrupt its inmates. Reed experiences no spiritual renewal after this show of remorse, but instead a gruesome beating. The episode concludes with his reflection on the construction of the cat-o’-nine-tails, “made of cat gut strings, with a little knot tied at the ends, and wounded at the ends with a small thread wire.”²⁵ The Bible lies in tatters, while Reed’s body is scarred by the cat. Piety and healing are banned from this dungeon.

Prison literature of this period was published to show the social and spiritual regeneration of white prisoners.²⁶ Reed refused to write himself into one more tale of redemption, opting instead for naked images of cruelty and suffering. There is no redemption for the Black inmate in this suffering; it is, rather, part of an idolatrous edifice provoking divine wrath.

Christian theological reflection on incarceration has the chance to move away from Thomas More’s model of redemptive suffering to Austin Reed’s prophetic denunciation. Calls for the abolition of the carceral system have only intensified after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Meanwhile the discourse of redemption-behind-bars remains a powerful force, especially in Evangelical prison ministries.²⁷ While certain segments of the Christian Right devote themselves to this form of rehabilitation, the movement as a whole aligns itself with the punitive policies driving mass incarceration, “backs the blue,” and equates “the criminal” with the demonic. Rather than remaining bound to the “pendulum” swinging back and forth between rehabilitation and punishment, it is time to heed another part of the tradition of Christian theological reflection on incarceration that Austin Reed gives voice to in his jeremiad.²⁸

Klaus C. Yoder, MTS ’09, ThD ’16, teaches in the Religion Department at Vassar College and co-hosts the podcast Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History of the Devil.