DH 101: EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY

Bodenhorn, Howard. “Criminal Sentencing in 19th-Century Pennsylvania.” Explorations in    Economic History 46, no. 3 (2009): 287-298.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2009.03.001

 

Bodenhorn argues that the extralegal factors, such as a defendant’s race, sex, and ethnicity influence the interpretation and enforcement of the law. He uses data from ledgers kept by the wardens at the Eastern State Penitentiary and Western State Penitentiary between the late 1820s and the 1870, and supports them with scholarly journal articles and books written on racial disparities, ethnic disparities and the economics of crimes in the 19th and 20th century. This resource is important because it draws on a connection between social justice and criminal justice. Its analysis helps to guide us as we explore the connection between disproportionate incarceration rates in our dataset and the social concerns of the 1830s.

 

Bruggeman, Seth C. n.d. “Reforming the Carceral Past | Radical History Review | Duke   University Press.” Accessed October 24, 2018. https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical- history-review/article/2012/113/171/79037/Reforming-the-Carceral-PastEastern-State

 

Bruggeman’s article frames Eastern State Penitentiary in the modern realm of prisons. It explains its role in the United States today, as a museum for people to visit. The article talks about race and ethnicity in Philadelphia and how the primary visitors of the museum are ones that do not necessarily belong in the mostly non-white community, the ones who need to be educated the most about the subject.  This article is important because while thinking about the past is crucial, it is also important to see the role of the prison today. This article focuses on mass incarceration in a modern sense, which can be compared to our data from our dataset. Additionally, it makes a point of the US prison population declining in every state except for Pennsylvania, where Eastern State Penitentiary is located.

 

Cassidy, Michael John. Warden Cassidy on Prisons and Convicts: Remarks from Observation and Experience Gained during Thirty-seven Years Continuous Service in the Administration of the Eastern State Penitentiary, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Patterson &  White, 1897.

 

Although Michael John Cassidy served as a warden some-time after our dataset (late 1800’s) this is still a useful source which is from someone who was actually working in the prison. The book contains chapters about prison statistics, reformation of prisoners, religious instruction, prison labor, insanity etc. There are question and answer sessions in which Cassidy answers questions relating to the aforementioned topics. This book is important in gaining further insight into what the Eastern State Penitentiary was like from an insider perspective. Although definitely biased, it could help us understand some of the open-ended note data.

 

Dickens, Charles. American Notes. Edited by Patricia Ingham. London: Penguin Classics. (2004).

 

During his passage to Philadelphia in 1842, Dickens visited the Eastern State Penitentiary and wrote about it in his American Notes. Chapter 7 is about Philadelphia but it consists mostly of his touring the Penitentiary. His remarks are impressive and very detailed. Dickens’ account of the life of a few prisoners and his conversation with them shows in more details what were the actual conditions that they were going through and their mental conditions. His disapproval that a person can be reformed in a solitary system is clear throughout the chapter.

 

“Eastern Apps: Visualizing Historic Prison Data.” n.d. Accessed October 17, 2018. https://www.easternstate.org/about-eastern-state/blog/eastern-apps-visualizing-historic-prison-data.

 

This was possibly our most important source. The easternstate.org website, the official website for the Eastern State Penitentiary, gave us insight to a lot of information regarding possible websites for research as well as most of the pictures on our website.

 

Gorton, Joe, and John L. Boies. "Sentencing Guidelines and Racial Disparity across Time: Pennsylvania Prison Sentences in 1977, 1983, 1992, and 1993." Social Science Quarterly 80, no. 1 (1999): 37-54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42863872

 

The source argues that sentencing guidelines is an effective tool for elimination racial disparity in felony prison sentences despite substantial increase in the average length of imprisonment imposed against felony defendants. The authors compared ordinary least squares multiple regression of pre-guideline and post-guideline, to analyze the influence of defendants’ race on length of imprisonment while controlling other variables to be the same. This source is an examination on the effects that guidelines provide to limit the bias between different ethnicities.  It can help us to see if such elimination offered by sentencing guidelines on unwarranted disparities exist in other defendant type other than felony.

 

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish became White. New York: Routledge. (1995).

 

While analyzing our database, we noticed that there were nothing indicating that some of the prisoners were White. Interestingly, some of them were classified as Irish separately from being whites. After some research, we came across Ignatiev’s book, who states that Irish, as well as Jewish and other Southern Europeans, were not considered WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). This is interesting because it show power relations in racial categorization during the admission of prisoners at Eastern State Penitentiary.

 

Johnston, Norman. Eastern State Penitentiary: Crucible of Good Intentions. Philadelphia. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Print. (1994).

 

Johnston is a specialist on the history of the Eastern State Penitentiary and in this book he argues that the Quaker reformists idealized and architectured the prison to be a model. It shows the civic consciousness which can be relatable by the description of the prisoners in our data set. The book has record drawings and study excerpts which are used as evidence and illustration of the penitentiary. This book is important because it gives a general idea of what led to its construction and what were the initial intentions of the penitentiary and how it changed over time. The book works good for the thesis because we can understand the religious ideas behind the solitary confinement (solitude, reflection, religion, and self-reformation) and the penitence act, or paying for whatever a person has done wrong. It involves religious views of the time from our data set which can be linked to the information from the data.

 

Johnston, Norman. “The World’s Most Influential Prison: Success or Failure?” The Prison Journal, Vol. 84 no. 4 (2004): 20S-40S. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0032885504269393

 

The resource argues that Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary--a product of the Pennsylvania system of prison design drawn from Enlightenment ideals--had the single greatest influence on prison corrections insofar as its architecture and rehabilitation strategy. Evidence to this claim is collected using primary accounts of former punishment techniques and architectural designs from the nineteenth century, as well as contemporary journals detailing comparative methodologies of several other institutions of the time. This source is important because it not only includes a historical account of the construction of Eastern State, but also traces the lasting impact it made on correctional institutions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article helps guide our thesis by lending background to our qualitative analysis of Eastern State Penitentiary’s influence on prison reform and rehabilitation.      

 

Jones, Jay. “From Shawshank to Al Capone's cell, historic prisons captivate tourists.” Chicago Tribune, 25 September 2017.

 

This recent newspaper article talks about the parallelism between visitors to the Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1830s and 1840s, and in the last twenty years since its reopening as a national historic site. Jones discusses prisons as popular tourism destinations, and recalls Charles Dickens’ strong desire to see the Penitentiary only second to observing Niagara Falls on his sojourn to the Americas.     

 

Kramer, John H; Ulmer, Jeffery T. Sentencing Guidelines : Lessons From Pennsylvania. Boulder : Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009.
http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=3329022

 

The source argues that the sentencing practice of Pennsylvania has greatly influenced the sentencing guideline of the rest of the states in US. Kramer and Ulmer provide profound inside information and theoretical reasoning with sophisticated empirical work, for example, how Pennsylvania fights for eliminating the impact of bias based on criminal’s ethnicity or gender. I consider this source to be important because Pennsylvania is the state where Eastern State Penitentiary is at, and I want to see whether the data our team has about Eastern State Penitentiary is corresponding to the conclusion this book has drawn out: everyone is concerned with equal justice under law. This book gives me a background about the sentencing practice in Pennsylvania, and it can help me explore what is the correlation between the sentencing time and gender or ethnicity, and see whether Eastern State Penitentiary has eliminated the bias or not.

 

Lauren J. Krivo, Ruth D. Peterson, and Danielle C. Kuhl. “Segregation, Racial Structure, and Neighborhood Violent Crime.” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 6 (2009): 1765-1802.

https://doi.org/10.1086/597285

 

The authors argue that city characteristics set the context for neighborhood violence. They use data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study for 7,622 neighborhoods in 79 cities throughout the United States. This resource is important because it reinforces the interconnection of race and criminal justice. Specifically, it makes us examine our dataset in relation to the historical context  to see whether or not there is also a positive association between segregation and violent crime in the 1830s, when there was not much separation between urban and rural areas.

 

Manion, Jen. Liberty's Prisoners : Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16xwc6s

 

This source records the transition the penitentiary system undergoes in the early American republic. Manion shows the central roles played by gender and sexuality in the project containing liberty through incarceration, as well as the close association between African Americans and criminality.  This source is important because it is closely related to the penitentiary system, which can give a reference to our dataset Eastern State Penitentiary. We can analyse the correlation between race/gender and criminality based on the findings this source offers.

 

Onion, Rebecca. 2017. “Admissions Books for an Early-19th-Century Prison Hold a Wealth of Stories.” Slate Magazine. May 2, 2017.    https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/05/datasets-hold-information-from-admissions-books-for-philadelphia-s-eastern-state-penitentiary.html.

 

This magazine article served as one of our preliminary researches when deciding to chose this data set. It helped us write our data critique with important information about the moral instructor and how the admission books were collected.

 

Padilla, Thomas. "Engaging Absence", blog (26 February 2018).

 

Padilla speaks about the profound effect that absences of information in data can have. He signals that they are just as meaningful, if not more so, than the inclusion of data. Absence, or silence, point to greater issues when taking into account how the data was collected, archived, or stored and by whom, or if there were any inherent biases when it was done. He brought light to an issue our team probably would not have considered as we evaluated all of our findings.

 

Patrick, Leslie. “Ann Hinson: A Little-Known Woman in the Country's Premier Prison, Eastern State Penitentiary, 1831.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 67, no. 3 (2000): 361-75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27774274.

 

Leslie Patrick argues that the administration at Eastern State during its early years was inconsistent with how it treated male and female inmates, and that female inmate experiences have historically been neglected and excluded from narratives about female incarceration. The evidence that the author uses stems from city archives and Eastern State Penitentiary records like the warden’s journal and reports, as well as books about Eastern State Penitentiary and books detailing women’s imprisonment in the 19th century. This resource is important because it gives an account, based on a case study, of a woman’s experience as an inmate during the early years of the Eastern State Penitentiary. This source could be very helpful as we explore the female prisoners in our dataset and try to find insight into differences between the males and females in our dataset if any exist. With the additional information and testimonies from this article, we can construct a more complete narrative using information that may have been silenced from our dataset.

 

“Pennsylvania Penitentiaries Developing Constructive Work Program for Inmates.” Pennsylvania Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy, vol. 10, no. 2 (1930): pp. 1-11. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003288553001000201  

 

This article promotes the enforcement of labor practices in Pennsylvania prisons on the basis that it maintains discipline and raises efficiency levels. It publishes a report which quantitatively measured the efficiency of county prisons by evaluating their administrations, buildings, and personnel, and also cites legislative acts governing the operations of state and county prisons. The source’s importance lies in that it was published by the Pennsylvania Prison Society, an organization with great influence over prison structures including Eastern State. Its comparative review of work programs in place at several prisons across the state allows us to understand the programs of the Eastern State Penitentiary in a greater context.

 

Riley, Jenn. "Understanding Metadata"(National Information Standards Organization, Bethesda, MD: NISO Press, 2017).

 

Riley helps clarify the concept of metadata in this article, which is data about data. She tells us that with careful consideration of a dataset, some signs can point to more interesting and idiosyncratic trends within the larger dataset. This idea allowed our team to ask more detailed questions of the information from Eastern State, particularly how we could analyze the moral instructor’s comments to find further information on the operational style of the prison.

 

 

Shmid, Muriel. “‘The Eye of God’: Religious Beliefs and Punishment in Early Nineteenth-Century Prison Reform.” Theology Today 59, no. 4 (January 2003): 546–58. doi:10.1177/004057360305900403. 

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Muriel Shmid argues that the Eastern State Penitentiary, from its system of solitary confinement to its architecture, was deeply influenced by religion and in particular, Quaker and Calvinist doctrines. The author mostly cites books on the topic of penitentiaries and punishments, written between the 19th and 20th centuries by a variety of notable philosophers and historians from France, America, and more. This resource is important because it offers an examination of the Eastern State Penitentiary through a religious lens, analyzing how Christian beliefs shaped prisoner discipline and reformation. This resource is helpful to our project specifically because it gives us more detailed insight on how religion influenced the penitentiary’s structure of solitary confinement and prisoners’ daily lives, which helps explain why religion is a large focus in notes from our data concerning literacy, discharge, and hope for reform. Shelfie: I found this article after searching, “Eastern State Penitentiary” on Google Scholar.

 

Thibaut, Jacqueline. ""To Pave the Way to Penitence": Prisoners and Discipline at the Eastern     State Penitentiary 1829-1835." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and   Biography106, no. 2 (1982): 187-222. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20091663.

 

Jacqueline Thibaut’s article gives illuminates the beginnings and creation of Eastern State Penitentiary. She analyzes the first 300 prisoners based on crimes, ethnicity, death, the correlation between ethnicity and sentencing etc. Although our main focus is from prisoner number 250 and up, looking at analysis of the early beginnings of the prison can give us insight as to how the system changed at all, or remained the same, over time. A major analysis of this article is also on the reform aspect of prisons from 1829-1835. Eastern State was a new kind of prison that is controversial throughout history and this article is important in the discussion and examination of prison reform.

 

Thomas, Jim, and Barbara H. Zaitzow. “Conning or Conversion? The Role of Religion in Prison Coping.” The Prison Journal 86, no. 2 (June 2006): 242–59. doi:10.1177/0032885506287952. 

 

Thomas and Zaitzow argue that religious and spiritual services should be increased and integrated into prison programs because it is a cost-effective method that would increase prison adjustment, enhance prosocial behavioral skills, and facilitate prisoners’ reintegration into society. Moreover, they argue that these programs should be monitored and evaluated during and after incarceration to assess the effect of religious activity on prisoners. The article cites a combination of books and journal articles on criminology and inmate culture, as well an empirical study on religious programs and recidivism among former inmates. This resource is important because it provides a perspective in which religious programming can be beneficial for both the incarcerated and the rest of society. This article is a helpful resource for our project because it can guide our understanding of the correlation between prisoners’ religiousness and recidivism. Shelfie: I found this article after searching, “religionEastern State Penitentiary” on Google Scholar.

 

Turabian, Kate L. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 9th. Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), chapter 4.

 

This chapter focuses on the level of a digital humanities project in which researchers engage with their sources. She covers the necessary steps, and breaks, to take in the tedious process of gathering, compiling, and cleaning components of extensive datasets. Turabian traced a path for our team to follow as we combed through our dataset of prisoner records trying to make sense of what we were seeing.    

 

Wagner, Paul. “Punishment and the Reason in Rehabilitating the Offender.” The Prison Journal, vol. 58, 1 (1978): 37-46. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003288557805800105

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The author argues that there is a fundamental disparity in the notion of human nature within the criminal justice system and within current criminal rehabilitation practices, which must be corrected through initiatives that introduce reasoning skills to criminals such as educational programming, creating common awareness of punishments fitting a crime, and vocational training. Evidence cited includes state and federal court cases, economic theories such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and statistical data tracking trends in inmates’ backgrounds and crimes. The article is important because it gives insight as to the failures of criminal rehabilitation by stating that rehabilitation programs rarely yield significant change because they lack the power to develop an intellectual skill set in the individual which prepares one to be reflective, deliberate, and responsible in order to prevent criminal decision-making in the future. Since the Eastern State Penitentiary was the first in the world to heavily focus on prisoner reform and education, Wagner’s article may give us both philosophical context and a practical method of evaluation in which to process the instructor remarks denoted in our data set.

  

 

Wintermute, Bobby A. "Crime and Punishment in Eastern Pennsylvania, 1903–18, Part 1." Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 84, no. 3 (2017): 363-385. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663967.

 

Wintermute argues that criminals were not merely social and moral deviants, but that their crimes should be placed in proper historical context. His evidence comes from a sampling of 121 inmates listed on the Eastern State Penitentiary plague and analysis of several case studies. This resource is important because its arguments reflect the redemptive nature of the Eastern State Penitentiary, which emphasized principles of reform rather than punishment. It provides us with new ways to approach our dataset, for example, categorizing offenses as violent versus nonviolent, and sentencing location as urban versus rural to see if there is a connection between the types of crime committed in a particular setting.