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Forms of Punishment:
Eastern State Penitentiary and Charles Street Jail
The Charles Street Jail in Boston and the Eastern State Penitentiary
in Philadelphia were two of the most influential and controversial prison
structures in the United States in the 19th century.
Eastern State Penitentiary (1829) was the physical embodiment of an attitude
toward crime and human behavior. The designers of Eastern State thoroughly
believed that if prisoners were placed in solitary confinement, forced
to confront their crime alone, seek Christian forgiveness, and were taught
productive ways of conducting themselves, then they might be successfully
reintroduced into society.
For architect John Haviland reform became an architectural challenge:
he created an imposing Gothic structure with 30-foot stone walls and a
massive central guard tower surrounded by radiating spokes of cells.
Many were suspicious of Eastern State’s solution, however, believing
that complete solitary confinement inspired fury and insanity rather than
peace and “penitence.”
As an alternative, the “Auburn Plan” emphasized silence during
days spent working with other inmates combined with solitary confinement
at night. The Charles Street Jail, championed by reformer Reverend Louis
Dwight and designed by architect Gridley J. F. Bryant, improved on the
Auburn Plan by modifying the radial plan of Eastern State into a cruciform
plan.
Despite their stunning architecture, the histories of Eastern State Penitentiary
and Charles Street Jail are hardly admirable. Armed with faulty and often
unusually cruel notions of reforming prisoners, these prisons stand as
lessons of the harsh turn that social reform has often taken.
But we may be living through an even more dangerous, divisive trend:
the disengagement of society’s powerful from social reform. The
fact that we no longer speak of rehabilitation -- or that antiquated word
“penitence” -- when speaking of prisons suggests our rejection
of reform as a governing ideal behind our prison system. Instead, that
fiery but ultimately unsatisfying and destructive emotion of revenge galvanizes
our efforts: prisons threaten to be the monuments of our age.
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