The American prison experiment has a 250-year history of good intentions and bad results:
Eastern State Penitentiary is one of the places where the American prison experiment began, and where one of its most bizarre iterations was tested on human beings. After it opened in 1829, Eastern State was, as it is now, a tourist attraction. In 1858, more than 10,000 visitors paid entry fees to gawk at the building and the men confined inside it.
The walls are what everyone sees first when they come to Eastern State. The prison, located on a rise in what is now Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood, is skirted by imposing 30-foot-high granite walls, crenelated turrets, and a medieval gatehouse. It was designed to intimidate, and it has always done its job.
When the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American and French revolutions, passed through Philadelphia on an 1824 tour of all 24 U.S. states, city leaders showed him the facade of Eastern State, then still under construction. According to all accounts, Lafayette recoiled at the sight. Thomas B. McElwee wrote in an 1835 history of the prison that the “form of the edifice was disapproved by LaFayette, in the memorable expression which he uttered as he crossed its threshold for the first time, ‘What! Have you Bastilles in this country?’”
Eastern State cost $780,000 to construct, making it one of the most expensive buildings in the country when it opened and one of the most expensive in the world. The paradox of the place was that this fearsome fortress represented the liberal ideals of the young American republic and an investment in building a more humane justice system.
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The modern prison is widely considered an American invention, one born out of a peculiar American mix of Christian theology and Enlightenment confidence. Much as the Founding Fathers sought to constrain the passions of majorities and lawmakers through checks and balances, prison advocates in the early republic wanted to use architecture and discipline to mold convicts into productive citizens while avoiding the sadism and spectacle that typified criminal justice in Europe.
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Unlike in the jails of the 18th century, everything in Eastern State was designed for the purpose of corrections. The prison was built around a central hub, from which cellblocks extended radially like spokes on a wagon wheel. Newly arriving prisoners were brought in wearing hoods, given identification numbers that replaced their names while they were incarcerated, and put in isolation cells where they spent 23 hours a day. Inside each cell were a bed and a worktable, where inmates spent daytime hours at trades such as making shoes.
The thing former Eastern State inmates most often recalled was the profound, tomblike silence. Prisoners were never allowed to talk to each other. The barrel-vaulted ceilings were designed to amplify sound, so from the central hub a guard could hear the faintest whisper or languid sigh. To maintain the atmosphere, guards padded through the cellblocks in wool socks.
The only human contact the incarcerated people of Eastern State Penitentiary were allowed was a weekly meeting, through a grated door, with local ministers. The ministers acted as “moral instructors” and kept notes on the prisoners’ prospects for rehabilitation.
The philosophical cornerstone of Eastern State was laid in 1787 at Benjamin Franklin’s house, when the humanitarian Benjamin Rush first proposed building a “house of repentance” for convicts. Rush wrote that inmates should be subjected to strict routines of “BODILY PAIN, LABOR, WATCHFULNESS, SOLITUDE, and SILENCE,” joined with “CLEANLINESS and a SIMPLE DIET.”
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Since the American Revolution, the nascent states had been working to reform their jails—usually nothing more than a filthy common room that held men, women, and minors together—and rewrite their laws to sever themselves from England’s despised criminal code, which by the end of the 18th century included more than 200 capital offenses. The reform movement was propelled by anti-royal sentiments, by the spread of Howard’s theories among the elite, and by theological objections to capital and corporal punishment—particularly in Pennsylvania, with its high number of Quakers. “As the sect with the strictest definition of what was due Caesar, [Quakers] were in perennial conflict with Caesar’s laws,” Ignatieff writes. “Hence of all sects they asked the most searching questions about the right of the state to coerce citizens.”
The problem with getting rid of the whipping post and stocks was figuring out their replacement. In 1786, Pennsylvania briefly tried sentencing criminal offenders to public labor repairing roads and digging ditches, but it discovered that leaving gangs of convicts to wander freely through the streets was a poor idea. The laborers, who became derisively known as “wheelbarrowmen,” wore degrading uniforms and were mocked by onlookers. There were also escapes, violence, and, in one incident, an attempt to rob Alexander Hamilton’s carriage as it returned from the Constitutional Convention. Public opinion quickly turned against what one Philadelphia Evening Post columnist called the “lawless and wandering banditti of wheelbarrowmen.”
Rush argued convincingly that public punishment degraded both the convict and the society that witnessed it. In 1790, Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail opened a wing of 16 isolation cells based on Rush’s ideas. It was initially touted as a success and copied in many other U.S. cities, but within several years these “proto-prisons,” as Rubin calls them, fell prey to the same overcrowding, riots, and arsons that they had supposedly cured. By 1810, the newfangled “penitentiary house” that had made Philadelphia a worldwide leader in criminal justice reform was widely seen as a failure, too small and poorly designed for its requirements. State authorities had to call up militias to quell prison riots and mass breakouts in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.
“American states’ first sustained experiments with long-term confinement as punishment for convicted offenders, drawing on Pennsylvania’s example, had failed—visibly and spectacularly,” Rubin writes.
In response to the failure of the proto-prisons and a rising fear of social disorder, there were proposals to abolish the penitentiary mode of punishment and return to hard labor, corporal punishment, and even banishment. In his 1818 address to the New York Legislature, Gov. DeWitt Clinton called incarceration a “failure” that enrolled criminals in a “school of turpitude.” Several states reauthorized capital punishments they had stricken from their books.
But reformers convinced state legislatures that what was needed were networks of larger penitentiaries located outside of major cities. This launched the first wave of American prison building.
