“By its very success, the liberal conception of crime paved the way for its own obsolescence. In the mid-nineteenth century, the prison had become the most widespread form of punishment, and solitary confinement the standard method for managing the penitentiary population, at least at night. But this situation soon met with a critique of the some of the most basic assumptions of liberal penality.

The critique began as an implicit question: Prison is an instrument of punishment, no doubt - but is it no more than that? Is it merely a method of forcibly inculcating honest ‘habits’ - that varnish of conformity with which Toqueville was perfectly satisfied? Even if it is agreed that crime is first and foremost an act, does it necessarily follow that such an act constitutes a one-way crossing of the border between honesty and crime? Are the mind and the soul of the criminal completely impervious to influence? The science of motivation, emerging from the practice of routine prison management, would soon be making a contrary claim.  

The idea was to act upon the criminal’s free will, the capacity for reason abiding deep within him; to pluck the subtle strings of desire and hopefulness that kept this capacity alive. The prison, the locus of punishment, would now turn to the business of motivating prisoners to do better in life. The horror it inspired in potential criminals, its fearsome reputation as a place to be avoided, would catalyze a rebirth of the will and a renewal of self-esteem. Yes, the habits prescribed by Tocqueville and his followers would have to be acquired. The key difference was that they would now be acquired willingly, progressively, and with the prisoner in control of the pace of change.

This reconciliation with the prisoner’s agency, this faith in his capacity to regain the self-esteem denied him by Tocqueville, was expressed by the Quebec prison inspectors in the following terms, in 1869: 

The cultivation of pride and self-esteem in the prisoners is a great moral strength to them. Pride is the most powerful sentiment of humanity, for it is the most purely personal. From this is drawn the principle that we should not degrade those coming to prison and already blighted by crime.

Investing in motivation as opposed to coerced submission because the cure-all applied by the liberal prison. This approach accorded with the primary values of liberalism in that it recognized the operation of the will as primary even in criminals, yet remained compatible with the imperatives of prison management, and especially cell-based management. The Irish model of Walter Crofton and early parole were the very quintessence of this development. Other examples were indeterminate sentencing and the use of merit systems in reformatories. In its new incarnation, prison was at worst a purgatory, one whose duration could be shortened by good behaviour.