In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont received permission from the French government to travel to the United States to study American prisons. The United States had instituted new prison systems in Pennsylvania and New York, and the two Frenchmen hoped to provide their government with data that could support building American-style prisons in France.
After a nine-month journey, Beaumont and Tocqueville, who believed that the purpose of incarceration "is to reform," or rehabilitate, found that although some states' penal laws and prison systems were "ancient" and "barbar[ic]," the "cause of reform and of progress in the United States" seemed to them "certain and safe."1 Indeed, in Tocqueville's more well-known book about his American experience, Democracy in America, he summed up his opinion of America's prisons: "In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States."2
