Forgotten Rebellions: American Penal Radicalism Between the World Wars

Abstract

Between 1910 and 1940, as the country's total population grew a remarkable 43.3%, the United States' prison populations more than doubled, leaping from 29,710 to 73,104 total residents. Federal-level incarceration saw the greatest growth, as United States Penitentiary populations nearly octupled, having held just 2.8% of all the nation's longterm imprisoned peoples in 1910, a number that rose to 11.6% by the eve of the Second World War (Cahalan, 1986, 30, 37). An increased reliance on "Big House" prisons, most of which held more than one thousand residents, accompanied this growth, especially throughout the 1920s. Between 1915 and 1929, the total population of the nation's 34 largest carceral institutions grew a disproportionate 76.9%, housing an average of 937 more residents at the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 than the number they maintained just fourteen years earlier (Cox et al., 1933(Cox et al., , 1043(Cox et al., -1050. 1 Accordingly, throughout the Great Depression, the nation's largest penitentiaries grappled with chronic overcrowding and, by World War Two, Big House populations regularly hovered between 1,500 and 3,000, a scale of imprisonment that directly challenged common early-to-mid-century estimations that any one penal institution could only capably handle between 500 and 800 residents at a time (Wickersham, 1931, 234; Barnes, Teeters, 1943, 485).