Birth of the penitentiary system in 1786. â Influence of the Quakers. â Walnut Street Prison in Philadelphia: its defects and advantages. â The Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. â Discipline1 of Walnut Street adopted by several States; its fatal2 effects. âOrigin of Auburn. â Pittsburg . â Cherry -Hill. â Disastrous experiment of complete solitary imprisonment; it is followed by the Auburn system, founded on isolation and silence ; success of this system in several States of the Union. â Wethersfield : creation of Singsing , by Mr. Elam Lynds . âEstablishment of houses of refuge in the State of New York. âPennsylvania abandons the system of complete solitude without labor: new discipline of imprisonment combined with new penal laws. âWhich States have not yet made any reform in their prisons; in what way this reform is incomplete in the States where it has occurredâ Inhumanity3 of some criminal laws in certain States. âSummary.
Although the penitentiary system in the United States is a new institution , its origin goes back to times that are already far from us. The first thought of reform in the American prisons belonged to a religious sect in Pennsylvania . The Quakers , whose principles abhor all bloodshed, had always protested against the inhumane laws that the colonies kept from their mother country. In 1786 their voice managed to be heard, and from this period the death penalty, mutilation, and the whip were successively abolished in almost all cases by the Pennsylvania legislature;4 henceforth, convicts had a less cruel fate to undergo. The punishment of imprisonment was substituted for corporal punishments, and the law authorized the courts to inflict solitary imprisonment in a cell, day and night, upon all those guilty of capital crimes. It was then that the Walnut Street prison was established in Philadelphia. The convicted prisoners were classified there according to the nature of their crimes, and special cells were constructed to contain those whom the courts of justice had sentenced to complete isolation: these cells also served to subdue individuals who did not submit to prison discipline. The solitary prisoners did not work.5
This innovation was good, but incomplete.
The impossibility of submitting criminals to a useful classification has since been recognized; and solitary imprisonment without labor has been condemned by experiment . However, it is fair to say that the trial of this theory was not long enough to be decisive; the authority accorded to all Pennsylvania judges by the laws of 5 April 1790 and 22 March 1794, to send to the Walnut prison convicted prisoners who previously would have been detained in local county jails, did not take long to produce in this prison such overcrowding that the difficulties of classification increased, at the same time the number of cells became insufficient.6
To tell the truth, a penitentiary system did not yet exist in the United States.
If someone asks why this name was given to the discipline of imprisonment that had been established, we will answer that then, as today, in America the abolition of the death penalty was not distinguished from the penitentiary system. People said: instead of killing the guilty, our laws put them in prison; thus, we have a penitentiary system.
The conclusion did not quite follow. It is very certain that the death penalty applied to most crimes is irreconcilable with a discipline of imprisonment; but once this punishment has been abolished, the penitentiary system does not yet exist; it is still necessary that the criminal whose life has been spared be placed in a prison whose discipline renders him better. For if this discipline, instead of reforming, only further degrades him, it would not be a penitentiary system, but only a bad system of imprisonment.
For a long time, France shared in the error of the Americans in this regard. In 1794 the Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt published an interesting article on the Philadelphia prison; he declared that this city had an excellent prison system, and everyone repeated it.7
However, the Walnut Street prison could produce none of the effects that are expected from this system. It had two principal defects: it corrupted the convicts who worked together by the contagion8 of mutual communications. It corrupted by idleness the individuals plunged into isolation.
The true merit of its founders was to abolish the sanguinary laws of Pennsylvania, and, by introducing a new system of detention there, of drawing public attention to this pointâŚ
Unfortunately, no distinction was made from the beginning between what was worthy of praise in this innovation and what deserved blame.
The punishment of isolation , applied to the criminal in order to conduct him to reform by reflection, rests upon a philosophical and true idea. But the authors of this theory had not surrounded it with that which could make it practicable and salutary. Yet their mistake was not immediately perceived; and the success of the Walnut-Street prison, highly praised in the United States still more than in Europe , gave credence in opinion to its defects as well as its advantages.
The first State that showed itself eager to imitate Pennsylvania was New York, which, in 1797, adopted a new prison system with new penal laws.
Solitary imprisonment without labor was allowed here as in Philadelphia; but just as at Walnut-Street, it was reserved for those who were especially sentenced to undergo it by the courts of justice, and for those disobedient to the regulations of the prison. Thus, solitary imprisonment was not the ordinary discipline of the establishment; it was the exclusive lot of serious criminals who, before the reform of penal laws , would have been sentenced to death. Moreover, those guilty of lesser crimes were crammed pell-mell into the prison; unlike the prisoners in the cells, they were made to work during the day; and the only disciplinary punishment that their guard had a right to inflict on them, in the case of infraction to the regulations, was solitary imprisonment with bread and water.
The Walnut Street prison was imitated by others: Maryland , Massachusetts , Maine , New-Jersey , Virginia , et cetera, adopted successively the principle of solitary imprisonment applied only to a certain class of criminals (a) in each of these States; the reform of criminal laws preceded that of the prisons.
Nowhere did this system of imprisonment have the success that was expected of it. In general, it was ruinous to the public treasury ; it never effected the reform of prisoners;9 every year the legislature of each State voted allocations of considerable funds to sustain the penitentiaries, and the perpetual return of the same individuals into the prisons proved the inefficacy of the discipline to which they were subjected.10
Such results seemed to demonstrate the defect of the whole system; however, instead of accusing the theory itself, its execution was attacked. It was thought that all the evil resulted from the insufficient number of cells and the crowding of prisoners in the prison, and that the system, such as it was established, would be fruitful in happy consequences if a few new constructions were added to the already existing prisons. Therefore, new expenses and new efforts were made.
Such was the origin of the Auburn prison (1816).
This prison, which has since become so celebrated , was first established on an essentially defective plan; it confined itself to some classifications, and each of its cells was intended to receive two convicts:11 it was of all combinations the most unfortunate; it would be better to mix fifty criminals together in the same living quarters than to put two together. This disadvantage was soon felt, and in 1819 the legislature of the State of New York decreed the erection of a new building at Auburn (the North Wing) to augment the number of solitary cells; altogether, it must be remarked that no idea as yet existed of the system that has since prevailed. It was not thought to submit the totality of the convicts to the cellular system; its application was only to be made to a greater number; âat the same time, the same theories brought the same attempts to Philadelphia, where the small success of the Walnut prison would have convinced the inhabitants of Pennsylvania of its powerlessness for good, if the latter, following the example of the inhabitants of New York, had not found, in some faults of execution, a reason to vindicate the principle.12
In 1817, the legislature of Pennsylvania decreed the erection of the penitentiary at Pittsburgh , for the western counties, and in 1821 that of the Cherry -Hill penitentiary, for the city of Philadelphia and the eastern counties.13
The principles that were to be followed for the construction of these two establishments were not, however, in total conformity to those that had presided over the erection of Walnut; in this latter prison, classifications had formed the predominant system, of which solitary imprisonment was only an accessory: in the new prisons, classifications were abandoned, and a solitary cell was to be prepared to receive each convict. The criminal was not to leave his cell day or night, and all work was forbidden him in his solitude. Thus, complete solitary imprisonment that, at Walnut, was only an accident, came to be the foundation of the system of Pittsburgh and Cherry -Hill.
The experiment that was undertaken promised 14 to be decisive: no expens...
