Eastern State Penitentiary: The Quakers Invented Solitary Confinement

The idea came from Philadelphia Quakers who believed in the possibility of redemption. If a criminal could be separated from every corrupting influence, every bad companion, every distraction, and left alone with the voice of God and their own conscience, they would eventually hear something that would change them. The theory was compassionate. What it produced was a different matter.

Eastern State Penitentiary opened on October twenty-fifth, eighteen twenty-nine, in the Fairmount neighborhood of Philadelphia. Each prisoner occupied a single cell, roughly twelve feet long, eight feet wide. They ate alone, worked alone, and exercised alone in a small walled yard attached to the cell. When they were moved through the building, a hood was placed over their heads so they could not see other prisoners or learn the layout of the corridors. They had no name in the institution, only a number. The theory held that silence and isolation would force reflection and, through reflection, reform.

Charles Dickens visited in eighteen forty-two and wrote at length about what he saw. He described the Pennsylvania System as inflicting, in his words, a depth of terrible endurance and an immense amount of torture and agony. He observed that men emerged from long confinement with a particular kind of damage that was not visible from the outside.

The architecture itself became the penitentiary's other legacy. The radial floor plan, seven cell blocks extending from a central surveillance hub, allowed a single guard to observe the entrance to every cell block simultaneously. Engineers and prison officials from across Europe and the Americas came to Philadelphia to study it. The design was copied in hundreds of penitentiaries worldwide. Eastern State held prisoners until nineteen seventy-one. It is now a historic site, its ruins preserved as they were found. The building that was supposed to rehabilitate people by placing them in total isolation now stands open to the public as evidence of what that experiment produced.