Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [49]
There was no penal theory underlying a prison of this type, except the idea of instilling so much dread that no sane person would want to be in one. A new breed of prison began with the remodeling of the Walnut Street institution in Philadelphia in 1790; the remodeled prison contained a “penitentiary House,” with sixteen separate cells, designed for solitary confinement. Pennsylvania had drastically reduced the number of capital crimes and decreed imprisonment in its place. Its constitution of 1776 ordered the legislature to make punishments less “sanguinary,” setting up instead a system of “visible punishment of long duration.” This meant, at first, that prisoners would work—and work hard—but in public, on the streets and highways. In other words, labor was to be a “form of public humiliation,” like the old shaming punishments.69 This system lasted only a short time. There were ugly scenes on the streets, as citizens and convicts taunted each other. The law of 1790, “to reform the penal laws of this state,” recited that the prior acts had “failed of success” precisely because of the “exposure of the offenders ... to public view” and their “communication with each other.”70
The remedy was to add “unremitted solitude to laborious employment”; this would “reform” as well as “deter.” The convicts were to be locked in cells that would “prevent all external communication.” They would wear “habits of coarse materials, uniform in colour and make,” which would mark them off “from the good citizens of this commonwealth”; they would shave their beards once a week; and they would eat “bread, Indian meal, or other inferior food,” and one “meal of coarse meat in each week”; meanwhile, they would do labor “of the hardest and most servile kind, in which the work is least liable to be spoiled by ignorance, neglect or obstinacy.” The prisoners were also to be “kept separate and apart from each other,” as much as humanly possible.p
Walnut Street was the beginning. Next came Auburn, in New York. Under the Auburn system, prisoners worked together during the day, and slept in solitary cells at night. The Massachusetts prison, opened at Charlestown in 1805, was at first nothing but a kind of county jail writ large, “with congregate living arrangements and individual piecework labor”; but by 1829, it was completely done over on the Auburn plan: the prisoners worked together by day, and slept in individual cells at night.72
The Cherry Hill prison in Philadelphia (1829) was another pioneer penitentiary.73 This was a massive stone building, surrounded by mighty walls. Individual wings or cell blocks radiated out of a central core. Each individual cell was connected to a small walled courtyard. The prisoners were utterly alone, night and day. They wore hoods whenever they left their cells. In Cherry Hill there was a rule of absolute, total silence.74 Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited and wrote a report on the penitentiary system, found the night silence in these great houses of captivity especially awesome: it was almost the silence “of death. We have often trod during night those monotonous and dim galleries, where a lamp is always burning: we felt as if we traversed catacombs; there were a thousand living beings, and yet it was a desert solitude.” 75
Penologists debated the merits of two competing patterns: the Pennsylvania system, where the prisoners lived and worked in silence and alone; and the Auburn system, where prisoners worked together, though also in silence. Today