DATA CRITIQUE
Link to Original Data Set
This data was digitized in 2015 from the original 1830’s admission books and were later entered into spreadsheets by Library Science students at Drexel University (easternstate.org).
The original source of this data set is based on the admission book provided by State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Records, American Philosophical Society. A baptist minister by the name of Thomas Larcombe kept books of all the prisoners and held the position of “moral instructor” for the Eastern State Penitentiary (Onion, 2017).
There is a lack of information towards the beginning of the spreadsheet in the Birthplace, Sentencing Location, and Ethnicity Religion Occupation categories. The data seems to be in admission date order for the most part, but the beginning data is a little bit mixed up where the lack of information is. Around 50 prisoners into the data, the data seems to be organized by admission dates and most of the columns. The columns with the most absence of information throughout the entire spreadsheet are the Ethnicity, Religion, and Occupation. It doesn’t say specifics about the offense (what type of robbery or theft: violent/non-violent?).
The Eastern State Penitentiary admissions book data is split into the following categories: FirstName, LastName, Age, Ethnicity Religion Occupation, Birthplace, Prisoner Number, Admission Date, Sentencing Location, Offense, Sentencing, Number Convictions, Column Note, Discharge Note, Description. It is interesting how the Ethnicity, Religion and Occupation categories are all clumped into one section. Towards the beginning of the dataset, the prisoners who were of African American descent or mixed descent were categorized as “Black” or “Mulatto,” while prisoners who were probably white were just described as their occupation. As time goes on, some of their occupations are added to the category as well. If a prisoner was female, this was also noted in this category rather than in the description category.
The offense category includes offenses like murder, burglary, horse stealing, forgery, stealing/passing counterfeit money, larceny, assault, battery, manslaughter, rape, arson, cheating by false pretenses. Sentence time includes various times for as little as 13 months to as many as 12 years. The sentence time is not very consistent and it seems as the time towards the beginning of the book was longer than towards the end.
The ColumNote notes the literacy/education of each prisoner and sometimes also notes the prisoner’s sobriety/drinking status and family/marital status. It is interesting because at the beginning when the admissions book was missing many prisoner’s sentencing locations or Ethnicity, Religion, and Occupation, they still made sure to write down whether the prisoner can read or write. In many of these descriptions, it also explains if they learned to read/write while in prison, and this is usually in reference to the Bible.
The Discharge Note category gives insight to when and if the prisoner was discharged, “time out,” “pardoned,” died, and/or if the prisoner has any hope.
The description is where the moral instructor wrote the religious notes about the prisoner- whether they were or were not religious, whether they prayed, whether the person keeping the books thinks the prisoner is “ignorant” or “stupid,” and the list goes on and on. There are really no bound for what this category might say. Sometimes it’s a story about their family and sometimes it's as harsh as “deranged and dangerous.” Whatever the description may be, it always seems very judgemental and harsh.
At first glance, the description category seems extremely tied to religion and religious beliefs. We figured this was due to the time period during which this was collected. Without having any external sources, we would not know that this was the admissions book collected by the moral instructor.
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The time period does account for the many kinds of offense descriptions that would have been more common at the time such as “horse stealing” which appeared more times than one would think, or “disorderly house” which appeared once.