Angela M. Zombek

Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis During the American Civil War Angela M. Zombek

Confronts the enduring claim that American Civil War military prisons represented an apocalyptic and a historical rupture in America's otherwise linear and progressive carceral history. Instead, it places the war years in the broader context of imprisonment in 19th-century America and contends that officers in charge of military prisons drew on practices that existed in civilian penitentiaries.