The Ideology and Practice of Inmate Reform at Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829-1971
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SEMINARY OF VIRTUE: THE IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE OF INMATE REFORM AT EASTERN STATE PENITENTIARY, 1829-1971 A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple Graduate Board in Partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Paul Kahan August, 2009 ABSTRACT Seminary of Virtue: The Ideology and Practice of Inmate Reform at Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829-1971 Paul Kahan Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, 2009 Doctoral Advisory Committee Chair: Dr. William W. Cutler, III This study is an analysis of the role educational programming has played in reforming inmates in American correctional institutions between the Jacksonian era and the 1970s. A case study, “Seminary of Virtue” focuses on the educational curriculum at Philadelphia’s famed Eastern State Penitentiary, a cutting-edge institution that originated the Pennsylvania System of penal discipline. “Seminary of Virtue” argues that Eastern State Penitentiary’s extensive and aggressive educational program reflected a general American belief that correctional institutions should educate inmates as a way of reducing recidivism and thereby “reforming” them. While Americans remained committed to educating inmates, Eastern State’s curriculum evolved during its century and a half institutional life. As its emphasis shifted from the religiously oriented “reform” of prisoners in the early nineteenth-century to a medical model of “rehabilitation” a half century later, Eastern State’s educational program evolved, shifting from a curriculum of rudimentary literacy skills, religious instruction and an apprenticeship of sorts to industrial education in the mid-nineteenth century and then finally to a traditional academic curriculum in the first third of the twentieth century. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... iv CHAPTER 1. THE CANNON AND THE CLERGYMEN........................................................1 2. THE PENNSYLVANIA SYSTEM, 1829-1866 .................................................54 3. CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN AMERICAN CORRECTIONS, 1866-1913 ............................................................................................................117 4. THE DE-INSTITUTIONALIZED INSTITUTION, 1913-1953 ....................170 5. “THAT MEDIEVAL MONSTROSITY,” 1953-1970.....................................225 CONCLUSION: “WHAT WORKS?” ..................................................................283 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................................................................................291 iii INTRODUCTION In the summer of 2006, I took a summer job as a docent at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which bills itself as “America’s Most Historic Prison.” The administrative staff instructed new guides about Eastern State’s revolutionary design and rehabilitative methods, as well as its various roles as home, hospital, and factory. One of the things they never touched upon, however, was the prison’s role as school; this is not odd, for in the year that I worked at Eastern State, none of the estimated 20,000 tourists who visited the prison ever asked me about the prison’s educational program. Yet evidence abounded that Eastern State educated as well as housed, fed, and sometimes brutalized its inhabitants: an exhibit on prison life featured a picture of a GED class, and spaces on the campus map marked the “library” and the “school.” Guides told visitors that famed bank robber Willie Sutton was involved in a flamboyant tunnel escape in 1945; no one told us that that Sutton taught in the prison school during his incarceration in the 1930s and 1940s. As I worked in the cellblocks answering visitors’ questions, I began developing my own: what and how did Eastern State teach its inmates during its 142-year existence? How did that program change over time? How did the prison’s educational programs reflect changes in educational policy? And how did Eastern State’s racially and ethnically diverse population of men and women benefit from these programs? These questions prompted further research into the voluminous literature on the history of American corrections, where I found little explanation of the connection between educational programming and the ideology of reform in America’s penitentiaries. This study is my attempt to fill that vacuum. iv Prisons are fascinating, exotic institutions that capture our attention and spark the imagination. The United States currently has no fewer than forty museums dedicated to the history of prisons, jails, reformatories, and corrections spread throughout the country; tourists come from around the nation (and sometimes even the world) to experience part of a life they hope never to live. But what is a prison? The best definition comes from Michel Foucault, who defined the prison as an “exhaustive disciplinary apparatus,” an omni-disciplinary institution that assumed control of all aspects of the individual, including his education, his work, his “moral attitude,” and his physical training.1 The idea that prisons, jails, workhouses and penitentiaries function as educational institutions might seem odd. For instance, noted historian of education Michael B. Katz drew a distinction between penal and educational institutions in his seminal 1968 book The Irony of Early School Reform, a chapter of which examined the creation of Massachusetts state reform school. According to Katz, this was “not…an institution intended to be penal but one designed to be educational.”2 I would submit that Katz created a false dichotomy between penal and educational institutions, and that a cursory survey of the history of European and American corrections reveals that penal institutions have provided educational programming to their inmates, usually as part of a rehabilitative program designed to reduce recidivism. The historiographical literature shows that European prisons and workhouses from at least the sixteenth century utilized education as part of a rehabilitative program, and by the eighteenth century, this had 1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 233. 2 Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (New York: Teachers College/Columbia University Press, 2001), 166. v grown into a program that blended religious, academic, and vocational education, all of which overlapped and were intended to inculcate morality and ensure inmates had the skills and values to sustain themselves upon release. But eighteenth century penal reformers were not solely interested in what went on in prison. Many believed that increased access to education would better the general population, making crime less likely, implicitly connecting ignorance and crime. My research indicates that Eastern State Penitentiary was a self-consciously educational institution, and that educational programming was the institution’s primary method of reforming or rehabilitating inmates. By education, I am borrowing noted historian of education Lawrence Cremin’s definition: “…the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, values, attitudes, skills or sensibilities, as well as any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended.”3 As its emphasis shifted from the religiously oriented “reform” of prisoners in the early nineteenth-century to a medical model of “rehabilitation” a half century later, Eastern State’s educational program evolved, shifting from a curriculum of rudimentary literacy skills, religious instruction and an apprenticeship of sorts to industrial education in the mid-nineteenth century and then finally to a traditional academic curriculum in the first third of the twentieth century. Despite the fact that the institution’s administration remained steadfast in its devotion to education as the main method of reforming inmates, there were a number of important changes at Eastern State between 1829 and 1971. The most obvious is the transition from moral reform, with its 3 Lawrence Cremin Popular Education and Its Discontents (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1990), vii-viii. vi undertone of religious salvation, to social rehabilitation, which connotes a medical or psychological understanding of deviance. When it opened, Eastern State’s understanding of its mission was rooted in a pan-Protestant Christianity that relied on religion to remake inmates. While education was the primary method of moral reform, the primary educator was the prison’s chaplain, assisted by visiting clergy from local churches and (later) by teachers. This was a very similar educational model to the nascent Philadelphia educational system, where Sunday schools dispensed both literacy lessons and moral training, and where the Bible was an accepted text in the city’s public schools. Following the Civil War, the nascent professionalism of both educators and penal administrators diminished the role of religion in both public and prison education. Penal administrators in particular began looking toward science for an answer to the problem of crime. Adopting a medical model, which emphasized physiological (and sometimes genetic) explanations for criminal behavior, penal reformers began talking about rehabilitation. In addition, by the Progressive Era, reformers went so far as to introduce small-scale social institutions like inmate government associations in order to