DH 101: EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

      The 1822 construction of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was intended to alleviate the miseries of public prisons and avoid the severe penal code practiced in much of British North America. Opened in 1829, the Eastern State Penitentiary was impressive in both its architecture and programs. Its revolutionary system of separate incarceration emphasized redemptive principles rather than punishment. Each cell was lit by a skylight, which was considered to be the “Window of God” or “Eye of God,” suggesting the church’s influence on the prison. Thus, prisoners were confined to their cells to study and receive religious instruction so that they may move toward spiritual reflection and penitence.

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       Our dataset is the record of admission of 520 prisoners from 1830 until 1839 kept by Thomas Larcombe, the ‘moral instructor’ for the Eastern State Penitentiary. It maintained a list of vital statistics about the inmates from that time period, including their places of birth, ethnicities, occupations, religious statuses, sentencing dates, locations, and lengths, as well as his personal remarks on their chances of eternal redemption and prognoses for advancement. These remarks especially lend a great deal of insight into our salient topic of identifying and analyzing the role that religion played in the novel concept of prisoner rehabilitation in the nineteenth century.   

 

       The prison is considered by many scholars and intellectual as the most influential prison in America, making it a place of interest not only for American scholars but for people around the world. The French, in particular, took a special interest in Eastern State Penitentiary’s way of reforming criminals. Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville wrote a book about the penitentiary system in the United States and its application in France. The admiration and curiosity towards the Eastern State Penitentiary are contrasted by the British novelist Charles Dickens. While proponents of the system believed that solitary confinement could save someone’s soul, Dickens compared it to being buried alive. Over a hundred years later, the effectiveness of solitary confinement is still debated by the Supreme Court of the United States.

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        The questions that still remain in the literature are related to the influence of religion in the reform of the prisoners in Philadelphia and how these prisoners were treated after being discharged. Our project hopes to answer such questions in light of the dataset we have available and the current literature that touches other aspects of the prison system in 1800’s United States of America. We are working on illustrating the connections between religion and reformation of the prisoners because we want to find out how authorities’ perceived religiousness of prisoners influenced their discernment of the prisoners. Was the system of separate incarceration effective in promoting redemption? Was the prisoner’s morality judged by preconceived notions of their spiritual direction or legal and extralegal factors?

 

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