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THE EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY AND QUAKER PRISON REFORM And yet — in fact you need only draw a single thread at any point you choose out of the fabric of life and the run will make a pathway across the whole, and down that wider pathway each of the other threads will become successively visible, one by one. — Heimito von Doderer, DIE DÂIMONEN One of the prevailing ideas of incarceration is, make the prisoner pay for his crime. Thus it is that one of the trends in US prisons has been toward leased prisons, in which prisoners are so much slave labor being forced to earn their keep (no, that’s not just an idea from a Chinese labor and re-education camp). Another of the prevailing ideas of American incarceration has been that of correction, and this trend gave rise in this period to the “separate” system of the “penitentiary,” the institution so arranged as an ordeal of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation that the hardened criminal would become truly penitent, repent of his or her crime, and determine that when and if released, he or she would follow in the future a straight rather than a crooked path. This is the idea which produced the prison which sits high on Cherry hill in beautiful downtown Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary, and produced in addition much prisoner mental illness and suicide. Some have alleged that this total-long-term-solitary-confinement thingie was just another of those crazy Quaker ideas — and I need your help in figuring out the provenance of this urban legend (which did not seem to be in existence at the time of the visits of the Marquis de Lafayette, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Charles Dickens in the 19th Century but which had come into existence by the time of Kurt Vonnegut who has credited and widely publicized this urban legend). “We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness.” — Kurt Vonnegut, FATES WORSE THAN DEATH Lecture at St. John the Divine, NYC HDT WHAT? INDEX EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY “HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE. Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY 1773 The compassionate Calvinist John Howard became the high sheriff of Bedfordshire and was so affected by what he was learning of the conditions of institutionalization that he would become a reformer of hospitals and prisons not only in England but throughout all of Europe. Fairly or unfairly, in WALDEN, this reformer would achieve a sort of renown as a case for application of the Biblical trope “Verily, he hath his reward” which we deploy to defend ourselves against the sort of selfrighteous persons who do good upon others for ulterior personal motives, such as to force others into displays of humble gratefulness: WALDEN: Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in PEOPLE OF his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what WALDEN are a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me. JOHN HOWARD Why such an extreme reaction in regard to this well-meaning reformer? Well, for one thing this Calvinist, Howard, would acquire a “tough-love” conviction of the beneficial impact on the prisoner of solitary confinement. In his model prison, the prisoners would be kept entirely isolated from human contact except during their hours of regulated labor. EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY Howard was a disciplinarian, whose regimen was to be effected through forced hard labor during the day, solitary confinement during the night, and, of course, constant mandatory catechism in the revealed truths of religion. In other words, he would not have accomplished more evil had he been an entirely vicious man. THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE HDT WHAT? INDEX EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY. Eastern State Penitentiary “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY 1776 In this year the new jail on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, built to relieve the overcrowding and scandalous conditions at that city’s Old Stone Jail, was beginning to close its doors for business. Members of the Religious Society of Friends, and others, organized the Philadelphia Society for Relieving Distressed Prisoners. After the Revolution, this Quaker group would manage this Walnut Street Prison as a place where malefactors might meditate and repent. They termed this facility a “penitentiary.” Instead of throwing all malefactors together regardless of the varieties of offense of which they had been found guilty, and regardless of their mental condition, and sometimes even without segregation of the sexes or age groups, as was at that point in time the rule in American incarceration, in that novel institution each inmate was to be given his or her private cell with a little garden, and would be expected to work. The idea was that solitude would help the prisoners repent of their misdeeds. That such total isolation would prove to be was as cruel as or even more cruel than some of the more usual punishments was not as yet apparent to these well-meaning HDT WHAT? INDEX EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY reformers of the PSRDP persuasion. It would be, perhaps, on the basis of this Walnut Street Prison of the late 18th Century, with all its good intentions and all its problematic theory, that, in 1991, Kurt Vonnegut would ascribe the invention of the penitentiary system to American Quakers. —If we did this thing, as for instance in the now obsoleted Eastern State Penitentiary atop Cherry Hill near downtown Philadelphia, then, as Vonnegut suggests, We might pray to be rescued from our inventiveness, just as the dinosaurs may have prayed to be rescued from their massiveness. So, did Quakers in fact, as Vonnegut asserts, invent the penitentiary system? Is this sort of experiment in the mental torture of solitary confinement indeed to be laid directly and solely at our door? Or is the Vonnegut allegation mere fakelore? QUAKER FAKELORE HDT WHAT? INDEX EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY SET AN EXAMPLE The world, not merely Quakers universally but the world universally, is desperately in need of spiritual guidance, and the need for such spirituality is demonstrably growing more desperate day by day. The problem the world has been encountering has something to do with Fake News — has something to do with elaborations and embroideries on reality that have been swamping our sense of the real and, by swamping us in this manner, causing us to lose all sense of bearings. I would like to see Quakers leading the way, to help the world withdraw from this syndrome that is currently consuming us all. — And I think I perceive a way for us to supply that so-badly-needed leadership. All we have to do is set a positive real example, of what it is like to abandon lies and deceptions and place our trust in solid verities. We could set that example, by publicly abandoning the large number of pseudohistorical accretions that have demonstrably grown up over our centuries of existence as a religious society, and then the rest of the world could look at our example and say with growing confidence “Well, if stupid Quakers can do that we can do it as well!” The world, and Quakers too, are (is?) very clearly committing the error of adding when it should be subtracting. As Thoreau said, Simplify, simplify. Often, less is more. Can we set an example of such simplification? I think that as a historian, I have uncovered any number of cases in which Quaker lore has become over the centuries encrusted with “just-so stories,” stories which are not only unnecessary but also factually inaccurate. Why do I need a Clearness Committee? Well, first, this compendium of error which I have supposedly created needs to be tested, to verify publicly that the items on this list of errors are indeed what I am supposing them to be, errors, falsehoods, just-so stories lacking in evidentiary foundation. I can’t do that without a whole bunch of serious people who will tell me, are some of the items on this list actually true and actually of value and salvageable, or is my historical judgment correct, and these pseudofactoids mere figments of folks’ imaginations? I am 82 and afibrillation and hypertension are giving me problems and time is running out and I can’t do this alone.
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