Summary: The penitentiary
movement
The penitentiary theory of “separate
confinement with mild punishments” was theorized
by members of the Pennsylvania Prison Society (PPS), a colonial
era voluntary
society.
Mainly through their Memorials to the legislature
they successfully championed a
sea change in social, cultural and spiritual attitudes towards
and values concerning criminals. Enlightenment and reformist
seeds that
were planted in the Old World took root and flowered in the
New World.
The vision and values of the “penitentiary” movement
were translated into the daily discipline of
the first state-run prison, that is, the Walnut
Street jail in Philadelphia,
and later architecturally enshrined in
the Eastern State Penitentiary (1830).
The “separate confinement with mild punishments” penitentiary
movement was a fitting complement to the Revolutionary
movement that created America as a democratic republic.
In a socially and religiously unprecedented way, the penitentiary movement
was the first ritual (institution) of the newly emergent
Protestant sect, that is, the Civil Religion which
formed to give expression to the revolutionary movement’s “America.”
By 1830, due to the
swell in inmate population and the placement of many prisoners
in one cell, the single cell/sole prisoner
penitentiary movement collapsed due to the fact that its
prison discipline could
not be practiced or enforced.
Ironically,
the distinctive and original architecture that
was put into stone as the Eastern State Penitentiary opened
was immediately,
as it remains, a tombstone.
Continue—penitentiary
