Laboratories of Virtue investigates the complex and contested relationship between penal reform and liberalism in early America. Using Philadelphia as a case study, Michael Meranze interprets the evolving system of criminal punishment as a microcosm of social tensions that characterized the early American republic.

Laboratories of Virtue demonstrates the ramifications of the history of punishment for the struggles to define a new revolution order. By focusing attention on the system of public penal labor that developed in the 1780s, Meranze effectively links penal reform to the development of republican principles in the Revolutionary era. In addition, Meranze argues, the emergence of reformative incarceration was a crucial symptom of the crises of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary public spheres.