<P> The widespread move to penitentiaries in the antebellum United States changed the geography of criminal punishment, as well as its central therapy . Offenders were now ferried across water or into walled compounds to centralized institutions of the criminal justice system hidden from public view . The penitentiary thus largely ended community involvement in the penal process--beyond a limited role in the criminal trial itself--though many prisons permitted visitors who paid a fee to view the inmates throughout the nineteenth century . </P> <P> On eve of American Civil War, crime did not pose a major concern in the Southern United States . Southerners in the main considered crime to be a Northern problem . A traditional extra-legal system of remedying slights, based in honor culture made personal violence the hallmark of Southern crime . Southern penitentiary systems brought only the most hardened criminals under centralized state control . Most criminals remained outside of formal state control structures--especially outside of Southern cities . </P> <P> The historical record suggests that, in contrast to Northerners, Southernern states experienced a unique political anxiety about whether to construct prisons during the antebellum period . Disagreements over republican principles--i.e., the role of the state in social governance--became the focus of a persistent debate about the necessity of southern penitentiaries in the decades between independence and the Civil War . </P> <P> To many Southerners, writes historian Edward L. Ayers, "republicanism" translated simply to freedom from the will of anyone else: Centralized power, even in the name of an activist republican government, promised more evil than good . Ayers concludes that this form of Southern republicanism owed its particular shape to slavery . The South's slave economy perpetuated a rural, localized culture, he argues, in which men distrusted strangers' claims to power . In this political milieu, the notion of surrendering individual liberties of any kind--even those of criminals--for some abstract conception of "social improvement" was abhorrent to many . </P>

After the american revolution federal prisoners were housed in state institutions