Q&A: "The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829-1913"-- A Virtual Discussion with Ashley Rubin
Extended answers from Ashley Rubin, author of The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829-1913 (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Q: What type of Prison was the Walnut Street prison? Why was it replaced by Eastern State Prison?
A: Walnut Street began as a colonial jail, then was used to contain prisoners of war, then it was reformed while still a county jail, then it became a state prison (the third in the nation) or what I call a "proto-prison" or what was sometimes called at the time a "penitentiary house" (although parts of it, even after the reforms ended in 1794, contained a jail, a prison, and a penitentiary house, confusingly, so it was kind of a hybrid). It was replaced or really supplemented by a number of county prisons (jails) like Moyamensing and others, but the prison part of it was really replaced by Eastern and Western. These two modern prisons were initially supposed to help the overcrowding at Walnut Street, but also fix some of its design flaws, so Eastern and Western and their Pennsylvania System were really supposed to live up to the ideals that initially underlay Walnut Street but that didn't really happen in practice. Michael Meranze's Laboratories of Virtue offers an excellent account of its rise and fall, by the way.
Q: What are the major differences between later use of Walnut Street Jail (Prune Prison) and Eastern State regarding reform techniques? Didn't Walnut Street Prison exercise reform measures (vocation, education, seperation, sewer) first?
A: Walnut Street included a number of really important innovations like hygiene measures—and was one of the first in the country to do so. One way to think about their achievements is what they were replacing. Walnut Street was a reformed colonial jail intended to fix the problems of colonial jails like the spread of disease, the comingling of different groups of prisoners (accused criminals, convicted criminals, debtors, witnesses, children of debtors, men and women, young and old, all together), and corruption by the keeper/jailer. Eastern was designed to fix the problems of Walnut Street and the other proto-prisons: things like overcrowding, disorder/lack of control, the spread of criminality, etc. There are a lot of difference between their regimes, but the biggest is perhaps the use of solitary: Walnut Street was still much like a colonial jail in that prisoners were kept in large rooms (but sorted by status--like gender and criminality) and solitary was only used as punishment. At Eastern, everyone was in solitary.
Q: Regarding prison Administrators in Eastern, did they self-select to work in this institution? Is there something about them (as individuals) that makes them advocate for the institution?
A: They absolutely self-selected. Technically, inspectors (the highest level) were appointed by the Governor (and later the Supreme Court), but many of them were already active in penal reform circles. Wardens, physicians, and moral inspectors applied for the jobs (or sometimes were asked). Many of them came from a tight-knit group of upper-crust families that basically hung out together in social reform and charitable meetings, local and state government, lived or worked with each other, and many married within this group. The interesting thing is this group contributed both to the admin side and the non-admin reformer side, so a priori, I'd say there was nothing distinct about the administrators relative to the penal reformers. It's more that once they became administrators, a lot of them focused on more practical issues than ideological ones (or both, but recognized the tension). Those who stayed reformers, or who were short-lived admin, sometimes wouldn't allow ideology to give way to practicality. But interestingly, it's that later group that did end up rejecting the Pennsylvania System, or rather requesting its heavy modification, while the admin rejected these (even while they privately manipulated practice behind the scenes) and insisted the Pennsylvania System was perfect as it was (even though they weren't really following that system as they claimed).
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about the brief experiments with public labor post-Revolution?
A: In Philadelphia, Baltimore, and I think one other city, people who previously would have been executed were sentenced instead of public labor in the streets basically doing public works, cleaning the streets, etc. In Philadelphia, they were called Wheelbarrow Men because of the wheelbarrows they used. It was very short lived, only lasting for about a year or two before being repealed in those various places.
Q: What caused public work penalties in the 1780s to fail?
A: Both public criticism (this was seen as degrading from some folks) but also public un-cooperation: crowds would jeer and harass the prisoners and sometimes provide them with drink. Also, some of the Wheelbarrow men were able to escape. So across the board, it was seen as a disaster. I highly recommend Michael Meranze's book Laboratories of Virtue, which covers this period in several chapters.
Q: Did Jeremy Bentham’s famous Panopticon figure in the Philadelphia vs Auburn debate, and did Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison figure in your approach?
A: Bentham was not terribly influential at that time. The Western State Penitentiary was however initially (sort of) modeled on the Panopticon, but in practice, it was missing important components (like the central watch tower). In the end, they had to tear it down because it was so badly built, and they did not keep that design in the rebuild. Eastern is built on the radial model, which was also popular in England but is distinct from the panopticon. I don't really use Foucault directly because his account is one of the big national overviews that just sees Eastern and the Pennsylvania System as part of a larger trend rather than taking seriously their differences from the national norm, which people at the time took very seriously. Basically, for Foucault's purposes, that difference didn't matter, but I argue that difference is central to the experience and history of Eastern as well as for the larger story of U.S. prisons in the 19th century.
Q: I am curious when/how your interest in ESP came to be and how that became a book?
A: I've been interested in Eastern since I first learned about it as a sophomore in college taking a history of crime and punishment class. It's so iconic and full of myths (so many of which are wrong or misleading, but intriguing nonetheless). I knew I wanted it to be a big part of my dissertation and even though I ended up changing my diss topic, I stayed with Eastern and focused on what I considered to be an even harder question, why it retained its unique system. And writing my diss, I knew I wanted it to be written like a book, so my diss is basically my first draft of my book. A very early, incomplete draft that took about seven years to fully revise.
Q: I note that David Rothman's brilliant The Discovery of the Asylum (Little, Brown and Company 1971), which shares your cover image, was published 50 years ago! How does your work relate to his Conscience and Convenience thesis?
A: It is ironic, because I draw much more on Rothman's C&C book than his Discovery of the Asylum, which covers the same time period that I'm looking at. My main interaction with C&C is to take complicate his idea of reformers v. administrators and the ideology v. practice. On the one hand, I see what he says happen much earlier than the Progressive Era he's looking at. But it's also more complicated: these administrators were also penal reformers. It's really everyone in Philadelphia was a penal reformer, but some were penal reformers and administrators. Once they became administrators, they did have a more practical outlook (and those who couldn't quite adapt to that often left sooner than later). So that's one part, just clarifying that the reformer-administrator line is blurrier in this period. The other contribution is to think of Rothman's C&C work (along with similar pieces like Jacob's Stateville) that sees admin as rational managers in conversation with earlier historical works that saw admin and reformers as true believers (part of the Great Man and Whig history orientation of the early and mid-20th C) and with some of the recent historical work that sees admin as basically evil, horrible people. I argue that we can't see admin as wearing just one of these hats---the rational manager, the true believer, or the bad actor. The men in my study really were all three (or at least two). For example, some of the most devoted, true believer like admin (such as two of the Quaker wardens) also manipulated the system (like many other admin there) and also tortured prisoners and embezzled from the prison. If we only think of them as rational managers, or as bad actors, or true believers, we can't understand their behavior. We really have to recognize that complexity and try to understand them on their own terms rather than on a single frame we impose on them.
Q: My great grandfather was in the prison after the Civil War, where he served in the Irish Brigade. Is there a way to research more about my great grandfather and why he was there?
A: There are registries of prisoners listed in a variety of locations. The APS has the moral instructor's log books, that contain some prisoners and details about their behavior. There are also intake logs at the state archives which list the incoming prisoners and their features (including sometimes scars, height, complexion, drinking habits, marital status, etc.). Beyond that, the warden's log contains some info on prisoner misbehavior, intake behavior, and release. There's also a record of discipline that was meted out. I think most of those use the prisoners names, but some documents only use their numbers. I would start by finding his name in an intake log and finding his number as well as the years of his confinement and then you can consult those sources to find references. Depending on the years, you might also find him mentioned in the Foulke diary I mentioned or even some correspondence, especially in the later years as restrictions about correspondence loosened.
Q: Since he had thoughts on virtually everything else, did Benjamin Franklin have any thoughts about incarceration?
A: He helped to found the first major penal reform society; in fact, he hosted at his own home Benjamin Rush's great talk (later published as a pamphlet) calling for "penitentiary houses." That talk became the de facto first meeting of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, which was founded in 1787. Unfortunately, Franklin died in 1790 (basically right when Walnut Street Jail was undergoing substantial reform based on Rush's and others' comments, and the efforts of PSAMPP's lobbying and hands-on work). So basically, all of this was happening at the very end of his life, but he did have a big impact on helping facilitate the early conversations.