Question

questions 18 through 20 refer to the following.
the laity church members... saw to it that the second great awakening exerted much of
its influence through purposeful voluntary associations, typically headed by boards of
direction on which laypersons appeared prominently....
contemporaries called the interlocking, interdenominational directorates of these
organizations the evangelical united front or the benevolent empire....
the social reforms embraced by the evangelical united front characteristically involved
creating some form of personal discipline serving a goal or redemption. prison reform
servers as an example. no longer would the prison be intended only as a place to hold
persons awaiting trial, coerce debt payment, or inflict retributive justice. reformers
reconceived the prison as connective function, as a penitentiary orreformatory, in the
vocabulary they invented. besides prisoners, other people who did not function as free moral
agents might become objects of the reformers concern: alcoholics, children, slaves, the
insane. the goal of the reformers in each case was to substitute for external constraints the
inner discipline of morality. some historians have interpreted the religious reformers as
motivated simply by an impulse to imposesocial control, but it seems more accurate to
describe their concern as redemptive, and more specifically the creation of responsible
personal autonomy, liberation and control represented two sides of the redemptive process
as they conceived it. christians who had achieved sell-liberation and self-conrol through
conversion not surprisingly often turned to a concern with the liberation and discipline of
others
a piece of evidence used by howe in the second paragraph of the excerpt to support his
argument about the goals of prison reform was that prison reformers
a saw prisons primarily as a form of punishment
b intended to use prisons to rehabilitate criminals
c sought to expand prisons to force debt repayments
d thought prisons were only to hold people before trial

Explanation:

The text mentions that "persons awaiting trial, coerce debt payment, or inflict retributive justice. Reformers reconceived the prison as a corrective function, as a 'penitentiary' or'reformatory' in the vocabulary they invented". This indicates that the reformers intended to use prisons for rehabilitation.

Answer:

B. intended to use prisons to rehabilitate criminals