Prison
Reform in Pennsylvania
By Norman Johnston, Ph.D.
Board Member Emertius of The Pennsylvania Prison Society PPS
Two centuries ago, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania became the center of prison reform worldwide.
To understand how this happened,
one must look briefly at the
early development of penal practices in William Penn’s colony. Penn, who
himself had been confined in England for his Quaker beliefs, abolished the Duke
of York’s severe criminal code which was in effect in other parts of British
North America, where, among other offenses, the penalty of death was applied
for murder, denying "the true God," homosexual acts and kidnapping.
Severe physical punishments were used for what were considered lesser crimes.
Pennsylvania’s Quaker-inspired code abolished the death penalty for all
crimes except murder, using instead imprisonment with labor and fines. The law
did call for severe penalties for sexual offenses: "defiling the marriage
bed" was to be punished by whipping plus a one year sentence for the
first offense, life imprisonment for the second.
Upon Penn’s death,
conservative factions in the American colony and in England reintroduced many
of the more sanguinary punishments. As late as 1780,
punishments such as the pillory and hanging were carried out in public.
An account of an execution that year related how two prisoners "were
taken out amidst a crowd of spectators–they walked after a
cart in which were two coffins and a ladder, etc., each had a rope
about his neck and their arms tied behin
[sic] them… they were both hanged in the commons of this city
[Philadelphia] abt. [sic.] 1 o’clock."
Jails up until the time of the American Revolution were used largely
for persons awaiting trial and other punishments and for debtors
and sometimes witnesses.
In the Old Stone Jail at Third and Market Streets in Philadelphia,
old and young, black and white, men and women were all
crowded together. Here, as in other county
jails in Pennsylvania at the time, it was a common custom for the
jailer or sheriff to provide a bar, charging inflated prices to
the prisoners
for spirits. In Chester
County, the English custom of charging for various other services
was also in force, e.g. fees for locking and unlocking cells, food,
heat,
clothing, and for
attaching and removing irons incident to a court appearance.
In 1776, Richard Wistar, Sr., a Quaker, had soup prepared in his
home to be distributed to the inmates in Philadelphia prisons,
many of whom
were suffering from starvation
at the time and even several deaths. Wistar formed the Philadelphia
Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners, but with the British
occupation of
the city the
next year, the organization was disbanded.
Because of the rapidly growing population, a new jail was begun
in 1773 on Walnut Street, behind the State House (later, Independence
Hall).
The new prison had
the traditional layout of large rooms for the inmates. Initially,
conditions were little better than they had been at the old
jail. Prisoners awaiting
trial might barter their clothes for liquor or be forcibly
stripped upon entering by
other inmates seeking funds for the bar. The result was great
suffering when the weather turned cold. One estimate stated
that 20 gallons
of spirits were
brought into the prison daily by the jailer for sale to the
inmates. It was also considered a common practice for certain
women to
arrange to get arrested to
gain access to the male prisoners.
After the peace of 1783, a group of prominent
citizens led
by Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush and others organized
a movement
to reform the harsh penal code
of 1718. The new law substituted public labor for the previous
severe punishments. But reaction against the public display
of convicts
on the streets of the city
and the disgraceful conditions in the Walnut Street jail
led to the formation in 1787 of the Philadelphia
Society for Alleviating
the
Miseries of Public
Prisons, (a name it retained for 100 years, at which time
it became
The Pennsylvania Prison
Society), the first of such societies in the world. Members
of the Society were appalled by what they learned about the
new
Walnut Street
prison
and the next
year presented to the state legislature an account of their
investigations of conditions and recommended solitary confinement
at hard labor
as a remedy and
reformative strategy.
An act of 1790 brought about sweeping reforms in the prison
and authorized a penitentiary house with 16 cells to be
built in
the yard of the
jail to carry
out solitary confinement with labor for "hardened atrocious offenders." Walnut
Street Jail, by the same legislation, became the first
state prison in
Pennsylvania. Following 1790, the Walnut Street jail became a showplace,
with separation of
different sorts of prisoners and workshops providing useful trade instruction.
The old abuses and idleness seemed eliminated, but with Walnut Street now
a state prison and the population of Philadelphia increasing rapidly, it,
like its predecessor,
became intolerably crowded. The large rooms, 18 feet square, which still
housed most of the prisoners, by 1795 had between 30 and 40 occupants each.
The Prison Society continued to urge the
creation of large
penitentiaries for the more efficient handling
of prisoners. Partially as the
result of the Prison
Society’s efforts, money was appropriated for
a state penitentiary to be built at Allegheny, now
part of Pittsburgh. The reformers also remained
convinced
that in spite of the small-scale isolation cellblock
at Walnut Street, that site would never prove the
value of the system
of separate confinement which
came to be called the Pennsylvania System.
Only an entire larger structure, built specifically
to separate inmates from one another, would be needed.
Article continues at—PPS
