The Human Experiment: The Eastern State Penitentiary

In recent months I have begun to think about the last 200 years as “The Human Experiment” – a time when people with often the best intentions get into a position of power and do things that affect a large portion of humanity in a very negative way – and nobody can change it. The experience which started me down this path of thinking was a visit we made last winter to the Eastern StatePenitentiary outside Philadelphia. The Bear’s son was in town for a conference so we went down for a few days to hang out, and needed a place to go that was *not* an art museum. We saw the promotions for this place and decided to go together – Bear’s son was very enthusiastic.

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 21^st 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.