Eastern State Penitentiary

I finally took a pilgrimage Eastern State Penitentiary, following a hundred and fifty years later in the steps of Tocqueville and Charles Dickens. (The outside looks like a castle, as you can see.)


Eastern State, which opened in 1829, was conceived by a committee that included Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush and lots of Quakers. The point was to cause criminals to be penitent and change through isolation and silence. It was influenced by Quaker ideas of solitude and Enlightenment ideas of surveillance (although, frankly, I'm not sure why you needed all that much surveillance at the beginning when the prisoners didn't leave their cells except to be outside in their own private yard for 1 hour a day).



The building was state of the art, including indoor plumbing at a time when the White House didn't even have it. The design was a radial plan--originally seven long spokes radiated from a center wheel; the prisoners had individual cells in each of the spokes. From the middle of the round center room, you can see down all seven spokes. More than 300 prisons across the world were built on the plan of Eastern State. Of course now I need to read Bentham and Foucault on the panopticon, which is what this prison is.


The original rooms had natural light from a skylight in the ceiling; later rooms sometimes had windows in the walls (all the plans changed after 1913 because of overcrowding--isolation was eliminated and two prisoners were placed in each cell).


In addition to skylights in the rooms, there were skylights in the halls and barrel vaulting in both the halls and the rooms.


The penitentiary is in an amazing state of disrepair for the fact that it was only closed in 1971. The tour guide called it a state of "preserved ruin." He regaled us with stories of escape and attempted escape (only one prisoner was never recovered). It's like The Great Escape--there's something irresistible about stories that involve such ingenuity and dedication. Of course, it was one of these escape attempts that led to a prison-wide riot that made the surrounding residential areas so uncomfortable that the prison was shut down.



One of the most famous parts of the penitentiary is Al Capone's cell, which is furnished as he had furnished it--and boy it is lovely--I would be happy to have that room. There is a nice little secretary, a fancy Persian rug, and a comfortable chair in the corner.


This is the 30-foot wall that surrounds the whole place. There's a little bit of extra fence here because this is the field the inmates used for baseball (later, when the original prison plan was abandoned).

Whether the Eastern State model was humane or inhumane was debated, even in the 1830s and 40s. Tocqueville wrote:

Thrown into solitude... [the prisoner] reflects. Placed alone, in view of his crime, he learns to hate it; and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for any thing better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.... Can there be a combination more powerful for reformation than that of a prison which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope; makes him industrious by the burden of idleness..?

Dickens, on the other hand, wrote:

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who designed this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentleman who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing....I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye, ... and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment in which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

These days, the Eastern State Penitentiary houses one of the top haunted houses in the country.