State penitentiary for the Eastern district of Pennsylvania

The State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania is situated on 13 acres known as "Cherry Hill", two miles northwest of the Court House in Philadelphia, Pa. The Pennsylvania Legislature authorized its construction on March 20 1821. Construction begain on May 22 1823 and was completed in 1829.

From the description of List of prisoner discharges and scrapbook, 1885-1890. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania). WorldCat record id: 151382914

The State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, commonly known as Eastern State Penitentiary, was the world's first true "penitentiary" in the sense that it was designed to inspire true feelings of penitence in the hearts of inmates.

"...Most eighteenth century prisons were simply large holding pens. Groups of adults and children, men and women, and petty thieves and murderers, sorted out their own affairs behind locked doors. Physical punishment and mutilation were common, and abuse of the prisoners by the guards and overseers was assumed.

"In 1787, a group of well-known and powerful Philadelphians convened in the home of Benjamin Franklin. The members of The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons expressed growing concern with the conditions in American and European prisons. Dr. Benjamin Rush spoke on the Society's goal, to see the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania set the international standard in prison design. He proposed a radical idea: to build a true penitentiary, a prison designed to create genuine regret and penitence in the criminal's heart. The concept grew from Enlightenment thinking, but no government had successfully carried out such a program. It took the Society more than thirty years to convince the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to build the kind of prison it suggested: a revolutionary new building on farmland outside Philadelphia. "Eastern State Penitentiary broke sharply with the prisons of its day, abandoning corporal punishment and ill treatment. This massive new structure, opened in 1829, became one of the most expensive American buildings of its day and soon the most famous prison in the world. The Penitentiary would not simply punish, but move the criminal toward spiritual reflection and change. The method was a Quaker-inspired system of isolation from other prisoners, with labor. The early system was strict. To prevent distraction, knowledge of the building, and even mild interaction with guards, inmates were hooded whenever they were outside their cells. But the proponents of the system believed strongly that the criminals, exposed, in silence, to thoughts of their behavior and the ugliness of their crimes, would become genuinely penitent. Thus the new word, penitentiary.

"Eastern's seven earliest cellblocks may represent the first modern building in the United States. The concept plan, by the British-born architect John Haviland, reveals the purity of the vision. Seven cellblocks radiate from a central surveillance rotunda. Haviland's ambitious mechanical innovations placed each prisoner [in] his or her own private cell, centrally heated, with running water, a flush toilet, and a skylight. Adjacent to the cell was a private outdoor exercise yard contained by a ten-foot wall. This was in an age when the White House, with its new occupant Andrew Jackson, had no running water and was heated with coal-burning stoves.... "Virtually all prisons designed in the nineteenth century, world wide, were based on one of two systems: New York State's Auburn System, and the Pennsylvania System embodied in the Eastern State Penitentiary. During the century following Eastern's construction, more than 300 prisons in South America, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and across the British Empire were based on its plan....The Pennsylvania System was abandoned in 1913. In some countries in Europe and Asia the separate system continued until the post-Second World War period.

"The later additions into the Eastern State Penitentiary complex illustrate the compromise reached when this munificent, ill-fated intellectual movement collided with the reality of modern prison operation. Warden Michael Cassidy added the first cellblocks in the 1870s and 1890s. They retain the barrel vaults and skylights, the feeding doors and mechanical systems. Mirrors provide continued surveillance into the new cellblocks from the Rotunda. But the cells did not include exercise yards. Inmates were issued hoods with--for the first time--eye holes. They would exercise together, in silence and anonymity. The system of solitary confinement at Eastern State did not so much collapse as erode away over the decades. A congregate workshop was added to the complex in 1905, eight years before the Pennsylvania System was officially discontinued. By 1909 an inmate newspaper, The Umpire, ran a monthly roster of the inter-Penitentiary baseball league scores.

"The Penitentiary administration produced a silent movie in 1929 to celebrate the building’s Centennial. The film focuses not on the historic nature of the building, aside from occasional references to its age, but on the modern improvements and recent changes made to the building. It depicts the new; factory-style weaving shops; the commercial-grade bakery and kitchens, staffed by dozens of inmates twenty-four hours a day; and the new guard towers with searchlights and sirens. Inmates are seen by the hundreds, filling the yards between spokes of the cellblocks. They line up in the new dining halls. But these inmates move, throughout, in the shell of the old Pennsylvania System. The cells, now used for two or three men, have barrel-vaulted ceilings, skylights, and a curious, walled-up door in the back. The work shops and dining halls are ten feet wide and hundreds of feet long; they are former exercise yards, roofed over, their party walls removed....

"The last major addition was made to Eastern State Penitentiary’s complex of buildings in 1956: Cellblock Fifteen, or Death Row. This modern prison block marked the final abandonment of any aspect of the Eastern’s original architectural vocabulary. The fully-electronic confinement system inside separated the inmates from the guards at virtually all times. Within the Penitentiary's perimeter wall, built with the belief that all people are capable of redemption, prisoners awaited execution. "Some of America's most notorious criminals were held in Eastern's cells. When gangster Al Capone found himself in front of a judge for the first time in 1929, he was sentenced to one year in prison. He spent most of that sentence in relative comfort at Eastern State, where he was allowed to furnish his cell with antiques, rugs, and oil paintings. Bank robber Willie Sutton joined eleven other men in a doomed 1945 tunnel escape.

"By the 1960's, the aged prison was in need of costly repairs. The Commonwealth closed the facility in 1971, 142 years after it admitted Charles Williams, Prisoner Number One. The City of Philadelphia purchased the site in 1980, intending to reuse or develop it. In 1988, with the prison site threatened with inappropriate reuse proposals, the Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force successfully petitioned Mayor Wilson Goode to halt redevelopment. The Pennsylvania Prison Society opened the Penitentiary for the first season of regular guided interpretative tours in 1994, and, in 1997, signed a twenty-year agreement with the City to operate the site. A new non-profit corporation, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Inc., took over the agreement 2001."

Bibliography

Quoted text from: Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Inc. "General Overview." Accessed June 19, 2012. http://www.easternstate.org/learn/research-library/history

From the guide to the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania records, circa 1830-1970, (Eastern State Penitentiary)

Responding to a perceived crisis in the rise of criminality and the breakdown of civic virtue, Americans of the 1820s increasingly looked to the new concept of the penitentiary for a solution. Of all the prisons built during the spate of construction that followed, none was more famous or more imitated than the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the wellspring of design for over 300 prisons in America and abroad. Built in the Cherry Hill section of Philadelphia, Eastern State was held up as a model of modern penal reform, the surest means of instilling repentance in hardened (or would-be) criminals, and it was considered one of Philadelphia's most noteworthy architectural achievements. In theory, the penitentiary facilitated intensive self-reflection through "cellular isolation" -- separating prisoners from each other, as well as the outside world -- coupled with equally intensive religious instruction. In practice, however, it became a pioneer in a new regime of harsh penal discipline.

Construction on Eastern State began in 1822, after an acrimonious contest to select the architect was settled in favor of a young emigrant from England, John Haviland. Although the prison's commissioners had initially appointed the more experienced William Strickland, America's master of the Greek Revival, Haviland's design was believed to be the less expensive alternative and had novel and appealing features. It was above all a brilliant expression of the penal philosophy of Benjamin Rush, Jeremy Bentham, and a host of Quaker prison reformers. Owing a debt to Betham's Panopticon, Haviland's prison was built upon a radial design in which prison observers were situated at the hub, allowing for unimpeded views of all cell blocks. Prisoners' cells were aligned along the spokes of the radii, but arranged to prevent any contact between them, and each was fitted out with a small outdoor exercise yard that was equally isolated. Forced to wear a concealing black hood over their heads, prisoners spent their time confined in near-total sensory deprivation, allowed neither to speak, communicate, nor see other prisoners, and permitted out for only one hour a day to exercise alone in confinement. During the early years, the silence of the cellblocks was broken only by the exhortations of a minister brought in to provide religious instruction.

Eastern State began accepting prisoners in October 1829 after only one of the seven cellblocks had been constructed. During its first four years, just over 200 males (75% white and 25% black) and four females (all black) were admitted for offenses ranging from murder and arson to prostitution and petty larceny. By the time the last of the original cellblocks was completed in 1836, the prison had become both a destination for sightseers, tourists, and dignitaries attracted by its reformist philosophy, and a lightning rod for critics. The totality of "cellular isolation" was a point of particular concern, and was thought perhaps to be conducive to mental and physical breakdown. Supporters of the influential "Auburn plan" of incarceration (named after the penitentiary at Auburn, N.Y.) argued that silent labor was more conducive to moral reform. Other advocates, such as Charles Dickens, who paid a special visit to the prison during his tour of America in 1842, denounced the "Pennsylvania plan" as inherently cruel, "immeasurably worse than any torture of the body." Still others argued that the penal system was simply ineffective in meeting its goal of reforming prisoners' behavior.

The central point of contention, however, may have been the extravagant cost and grandiosity of the prison's design. Originally budgeted for $100,000, the construction costs had ballooned to an extraordinary $772,600 by 1836. As a result of the mounting controversy, a joint legislative committee was delegated in December 1834 to investigate the operations of Eastern State, and to evaluate charges of licentiousness on the part of staff, misuse of funds, embezzlement, and of outright cruelty to prisoners.

In the end, criticism of the system of cellular isolation slowly began to erode its practice, as reformers sought to reform the reform. Labor was introduced among the inmates in the 1830s, partly by directive of the state (and against the wishes of some of the prison's overseers). From that time forward, prisoners learned and labored at a trade within their cells, making shoes, textiles, picking oakum, or performing other manual tasks. By 1903, prisoners were no longer required to wear masks, and silence fell by the wayside shortly thereafter. The prison remained in operation until July 1970, and today it is a National Historical Landmark, still a draw for visitors.

Thomas Larcombe, the first moral instructor at the prison, united with the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia in 1807 at the age of 16, and was ordained a minister in 1821. He was pastor at churches in New Hopewell and Bordentown, N.J., and later at Colebrook, Conn., and he served at Eastern State from about 1837 into the 1850s.

From the guide to the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Records, 1819-1955, (American Philosophical Society)