PRISONERS
During the late 1700's and early 1800's, Philadelphia was a prominent city in the East Coast. The Bank of the United States at Philadelphia was a monumental building, the city was bathed by the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, which made progress geographically ideal (Johnston, 2010). These factors helped to attract people to that area in search of progress and, for some, a place for crime. The prisoners of Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP) were not exclusively from Pennsylvania. Many of them had their roots in other places in the United States and the world. But they all have one thing in common: They have been sentenced to spend years of solitary confinement inside the walls of ESP. The map below shows the connection between the prisoners' birthplace to the place where they have been sentenced.
Move the cursor or double click to zoom in the map and find more details
Even though most of the prisoners were from Pennsylvania, the map shows that Philadelphia and its surrounding cities were a destination for many immigrants, especially those with Irish background. The Admission’s book does not refer to anyone as being white so the silence in our data regarding people who did not have any ethnic information were regarded by our team as being of White ethnicity. However, people with Irish background was categorized as “Irish Catholic”. At that point in American history, Irish immigrants were not granted “white membership” as they were still regarded as not being part of the White American Protestant society (Ignatiev, 1995).
The offense can be divided into three categories: (1) nonviolent, property-related crimes; (2) violent offenses against persons or property; (3) sexual-related crimes. The majority of prisoners, 519 in all, were convicted of nonviolent, property-related crimes such larceny, robbery, burglary, intent to steal, receiving stolen goods and horse stealing. Larceny is the most frequent offense type which takes up to around 55.7%. Around 9.8% prisoners were convicted of various violent crimes, including assault and battery, assault with intent to kill, murder and manslaughter. Sexual-related offenses, including rape, attempted rape, statutory rape and assault with intent to ravish are only about 1% of all convicted crimes.
In Muriel Shmid’s The Eye of God, the author examines how the religious beliefs of the prison’s authorities, specifically Quaker and Calvinist doctrines, formed the foundation of Eastern State Penitentiary’s architecture and prisoner reformation. In particular, Shmid claims, “Eastern State Penitentiary was the result of an enlightened Christian ideal that sought to save lost human souls through an individual and rational process of self-examination rather than by violent corporal punishment” (Shmid 2003). Shmid also states, “Through meditation, solitude, and self-examination, prisoners were expected to undergo a conversion process, to recognize their guilt, and to seek God’s forgiveness” (Shmid 2003). With this knowledge and religious context, we understand that the prison’s physical and theoretical design intended to isolate prisoners to promote religious self-reflection with the end goal of prisoners’ professing their devotion to Christianity.
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We can also understand why the profession and practice of Christian religion by prisoners appeared to be a core measurement of the extent to which the moral instructor and other prison administrators perceived a prisoner’s mental sanity and likeliness to re-offend and readjust to society after discharge. With this in mind, we wanted to explore whether perceived religiousness of prisoners by moral instructors was positively correlated with the hopefulness and/or sanity of prisoners. In doing this, we hope to gain insight into an important question: was the moral instructor more likely to evaluate prisoners as mentally sane and hopeful if they showedChristian religious impressions? How did this affect the evaluation of those who were not Christian? Were non-religious individuals more often deemed as hopeless or demented than religious individuals?
We examined our dataset, focusing particularly on mentions of Christian religion and hope in each prisoner’s description and searched for overlaps between the presence, or lack thereof, of religious, specifically Christian, impressions and hopefulness. In cleaning the data, we read through each individual description and while some descriptions explicitly stated whether the prisoner had religious impressions, for those that did not, we used the available data to infer whether the individual had Christian impressions and whether the instructor had hope in the individual. For example, many descriptions mentioned that the prisoner prays or had asked for a bible, and so we considered that prisoner as having religious impressions. Furthermore, since the prison’s emphasis was on Christianity, we categorized those noted as Catholic or otherwise non-Christian as not having Christian religious impressions. [The visualization below] shows that individuals with Christian impressions were more often deemed as “Hopeful,” while individuals with no religious impressions were more often deemed as “Hopeless.” Non-religious individuals also comprised the largest category of demented individuals.
If the moral instructor’s evaluation of hope and sanity of prisoners was contingent on how devout and expressive the prisoner’s Christian values were, this highlights the subjectivity inherent in the instructor’s evaluation of prisoners based on his own Christian beliefs. The extent to which a prisoner is devoutly Christian should not necessarily mean that a prisoner is “hopeless” or demented, but evidently, large numbers of non-Christian prisoners were deemed as such. This may also be an indication that the reform design of solitary confinement based on Christian spiritual reflection was not as effective in producing God-seeking prisoners as originally intended.
A large portion of our data was in the “Description” category. This was the category with the least amount of missing data. While there were many silences in most of the other categories. Thomas Larcombe, the moral instructor for the prison, made a description for every prisoner in this particular data set. This data was comprised of qualitative data, describing a range of topics and themes. Some topics include moral values, religious values, life stories, crime stories etc. There is no consistency among prisoners and the kind of information he notes. This data is subjective, based on Larcombe’s bias as a Christian religious instructor, often commenting on the state of their religious and moral reform. For this reason, we coded every description as being, “hopeful,” “hopeless,” or “demented.” We created another small category named “other.” Prisoners without any description at all, the single prisoner who escaped, and the prisoner’s whose descriptions only noted the fact that they do not speak English. Which in itself shows, Larcombe’s disregard for those who he thought had no potential for being religious. Some descriptions explicitly stated whether Larcombe believed this person was hopeful, was hopeless or demented; but most did not explicitly state this. We did our best to fill these silences by deciding every prisoner’s category based on the moral instructor’s overall tone, context and word choice Larcombe used in his description.With less than half of Eastern State Penitentiary’s prisoner population at this time seeming to have any hope of any reform whatsoever, it is clear that the new solitary confinement system the prison adopted was not very effective.
Even before the penitentiary was finished in 1836, it was already beginning to accept prisoners. The prisoners’ ethnicity included Black, German, Irish, and Unknown, which may have been Native White. The number of imprisonment peaked in 1838, with 110 records for Unknown, and 59 records for Black. Coincidentally, this was also the year the “moral instructor” was appointed by the Board of Inspectors to visit the prisoners at least once a month to promote religious education (Johnston 2010).
After categorizing individuals as "hopeful," "hopeless," or "demented," and analyzing these categorizations in relation to ethnicity, it is evident that there is no strong correlation. Further revealing that Thomas Larcombe's descriptions and judgments were probably based solely on subjective beliefs rather than any cultural or criminal status.
During his visit to the United States in 1842, Charles Dickens passed by Philadelphia and visited ESP. Dickens (2004, 111) defined the “rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement” system as “cruel and wrong”. His view of the solitary system is described in his book as having a good intention for the reformation of prisoners but achieved by means that is unnatural to the human being. The moment a prisoner enters ESP, his/her name is replaced by a number (Johnston, 2010). She or he is referred to such number, in a process that dehumanizes the prisoners. Dickens had the opportunity to talk to two of the people who managed the prison. When asked about the process of leaving the prison, one of them responded that most prisoners left ESP in a shock to be in the outside world, acting in a demented way, trembling from a nervous attack (Dickens, 2004). So, no prisoner leaves ESP as a reformed man that is mentally or morally healthy.​
Charles Dickens
It is my fixed opinion that those who have undergone this punishment, MUST pass into society again morally unhealthy and diseased ​
The sentencing years were disproportionately assigned. One expects that the number of years for a non-violent crime would be less than that of a violent crime. The chart below shows that the sentencing years for non-violent crimes (burglary, larceny, etc.) is on an approximate range for those of violent crimes (rape, manslaughter, murder, etc.). Dickens (2004, 113) mentions that one prisoner was serving a 9-year sentence for receiving stolen goods in his second offense. So, clearly, there were people going to jail for non-violent crimes and serving the same number of years as people who committed violent crimes. The chart shows that one prisoner was sentenced to 13 years for stealing a horse. Burglary and larceny, two of the most common crimes, have the widest range of sentencing years.