Description
Seminary of Virtue explores the history of penal education programs, demonstrating that The us’s prisons have historically been educational (in addition to punitive) institutions. This volume argues that Eastern State Penitentiary’s extensive and aggressive educational program reflected a general American belief that correctional institutions will have to educate inmates as some way of reducing recidivism and thereby «reforming» them. No mere case study, Seminary of Virtue demonstrates that for the last 2 hundred years penologists have believed that educational programming used to be some of the keys to lowering recidivism and «reforming» inmates. Seminary of Virtue also reveals the historical amnesia that hindered American penal reform over the similar period of time as every succeeding generation believed that their particular penal reforms were revolutionary.