You
could only get in on a tour, and we arrived in time to catch one in the early
afternoon of a desperately cold winter day with a very well-informed tour
guide. The Bear and I were interested because we’d seen a similar penitentiary
in Paris the year before, out the window of our hotel – it was one of the
earliest radial-designed jails from the 1800s. We were not able to go inside
that one, so this was the next best. We discovered on this visit that the one
in Philadelphia was the first of its type.
Prior
to the creation of this facility in 1829, jails had been places where large
numbers of people were locked up in common rooms, without any thought to
rehabilitation, but rather to punishment. The jails were not sanitary, there
were illicit businesses running inside to provision the prisoners and keep them
in vices (and doubtless, the wardens in sherry). Dirty, sinful, unrepentant
warehouses for people who would just get out and do the same things again.
So
thoughtful people began to consider this problem; the Philadelphia Society for
Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons was formed as the first such organized
group to consider the state of prisons and how they might be made better. In
the case of the Eastern State Penitentiary, they actually invented a new word
which we hardly contemplate today – the Penitentiary – a place to be penitent,
to grow spiritually, to gain a new outlook on life and to come out rejuvenated
and better equipped to deal with the difficult pressures of modern life. The
Quaker influence was significant in their thinking.
This
group promoted their idea of the penitentiary to the Philadelphia and
Pennsylvania government, to whom it was truly an appealing idea, and in 1821 it
was approved and funded by the Pennsylvania legislature – it would be the
largest and most expensive building to that point in the new country. As it
evolved, every aspect of the building was considered to help create this
environment of penitence. Each prisoner was given a “cell” all his or her own.
They had a skylight and a tiny patch of grass at the back of the cell so they
could see “nature”. The building had to have a large-scale plumbing
installation – the first of its kind in the United States – so that the
prisoners could have a toilet in their cell and would not have to be taken out
to do their business. Simple furniture was put in the room, and of course, a
Bible to support their contemplation.
To
ensure that this contemplative isolation was complete, prisoners were not
allowed to see anyone else. Food was slid through the door and guards were
unseen. If a prisoner had to be moved in the facility, they would be
blindfolded and led to the new place. All of this was seen as a requirement to
create the appropriate conditions for contemplation and repentance – and was
called “The Silent System.”
More
money was spent on the construction of the Eastern State Penitentiary in the
1880s than was spent on the White House in Washington – and it had indoor
plumbing, central heating, and shower baths en suite before that august
building. The building was designed to have a center tower, and five spokes off
the center, each one housing a “penitent” in unique cells – a design copied in
more than 500 penitentiaries around the world in the years that followed. They
managed to get two spokes built in the Eastern State building in the beginning.
There
were a few small problems. Because the plumbing was still very new technology,
it didn’t work very well, so the toilets in each cell allowed a lot of sewer
gas to come into the cells which was a bit unpleasant. It was very cold in the
winter, and it was difficult to heat the cells, so it was a rather
uncomfortable environment in winter (which we experienced when we were there –
desperately cold and damp).
But
there was something else – an unintended consequence. Within a few months of
being placed into these cells alone, the inmates went completely insane. It
turns out that if human beings are isolated into low-sensation and zero contact
environments, they lose their minds completely in short order. All the
well-meaning (but unknowledgeable) people who had created this place did not
anticipate this result.
Nobody
did anything to address it, however. Rather, life got in the way, and within a
couple of years there were vastly more prisoners being produced by the judicial
system than the founders of the penitentiary had anticipated. Within about two
years, they had to double up prisoners in cells, because they simply did not
have the room to house them anywhere.
![]() |
Eastern State Penitentiary - January 2012 |
Not
long after, they had to construct a second story on several of the spokes to
accommodate the volume of influx. This invalidated the idea of the patch of
grass and skylight – now many cells lacked both. Curiously, though prisoners
were still blindfolded when they were transported, at least one cell block was
designed by a leading Gothic architect – a bizarre design element for a 21st
century visitor and one from which inmates would have derived no inspiration.
The
prison had its famous inmates – Al Capone had a sojourn there in which he had a
very nicely-equipped cell with furniture, a record player, and Oriental carpets
on the floor. Thus we see that even in that awful place, some were more equal
than others. Most inmates continued to freeze or boil in their stinking cells,
as the remediation of the sewage system was expensive and put off for decades.
In
all of this, there was never an official re-thinking of the philosophy –
indeed, inmates are still put into cells today with a toilet and sink. Often in
pairs, today they are allowed communal time in the yard with other inmates, and
various social activities like eating together and work details which doubtless
have put madness at bay for at least some. Whether these changes came about
because someone realized that isolation was not a good answer, or rather
because it was less expensive to do it this way, is not known to me as of this
writing. However, at some point, someone realized that isolation was not good
for humans and produced undesirable effects. Fortunately!
I
think of this as part of the Human Experiment – a less than sunny set of events
in the view of La Calavera, where assumptions by ignorant people are allowed to
dominate large portions of society to the detriment of everyone – and not
changed for decades or a century. Because, well, it wouldn’t do to admit they
were wrong.
I
am starting to collect these, and will report in due course on the Pruitt Igoe
Housing Projects in St. Louis, Missouri, built in the 1950s. Such a great idea
– drowned in narrow-minded and wrong-headed social ideas together with lack of
planning that created ruins in a situation that should have created wonderful
new communities and a new world. There are so many other examples too. It’s
worth thinking about.
More
anon.
No comments:
Post a Comment