Eastern State Penitentiary: A History
1.
What inspired you to write a book, Eastern State Penitentiary: A History, about a prison?
I actually worked at Eastern
State for about 18 months as a docent (a tour guide/interpreter). I was in
graduate school at Temple at the time, and I was particularly interested in
museum work, so working at Eastern State Penitentiary was a great opportunity.
When it came time to write my dissertation, I decided to explore the history of
prison education programs in the United States and use Eastern State
Penitentiary as a case study (later published as Seminary of Virtue). To do that, I needed a really in-depth history
of the prison which simply did not exist, so I decided to write it!
2. How did you go about
researching its history?
Well, I used a lot of traditional sources: official reports, grand jury
investigations, etc. These were great sources for the administrators’ version
of the prison’s history, but records were also very “sterile;” what I wanted
was a human perspective as well as an institutional one. Unfortunately, few
records created by the penitentiary’s inmates have survived, particularly for
the nineteenth-century. I overcame that by culling hundreds of stories about
ESP from local, regional, and national newspapers and by using hundreds of
pages of oral histories contained in the penitentiary’s archives.
3.
What challenges did you have in writing this book?
The biggest
challenge is the shortage of sources documenting the inmates’ perspectives.
Because ESP’s inmates were usually poor and uneducated, a fair percentage of
them were illiterate. Even for literate inmates, their letters have not
survived. Therefore, I had to develop strategies for telling their stories. One
was an extensive search of the memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies of
individuals who visited the penitentiary. Another was the oral histories of the
penitentiary’s inmates, guards, and administrators. Last were newspaper and
magazine articles that documented escapes, uprisings, and other unusual events
in ESP’s long history.
4.
What was so unique about ESP?
ESP is the United States’
first penitentiary, or an institution designed to reform inmates. Previously,
incarceration had been used sparingly and for brief periods of time (with the
exception of imprisonment for debt), and punishments were usually physical. By
the end of the eighteenth century, some people began arguing that sanctions for
criminal behavior should serve a higher purpose: they should be calculated to
reform lawbreakers. These ideas were put into practice in the 1790s at the
Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, but only on a limited scale. They were also
tried at a purpose-built prison in Pittsburgh, the Western State Penitentiary
(opened 1826), but they really came into being at Eastern State Penitentiary
(opened 1829). Here, all of the inmates were placed in individual cells and
thereby segregated from one another. Though frequently called “isolation,” this
was not the case: inmates were visited by a stream of prison officials,
religious instructors, and outside visitors. This regimen, which came to be
called the “Pennsylvania System,” became the basis for operating hundreds of
prisons across the world (though it eventually lost out to the more economical
“New York System”).
5. Were
you spooked spending time at the prison?
Not at all. I spent
thousands of hours in the prison, including staffing several overnight ghost
hunts, and I never saw anything that can be described as supernatural or
unusual.
6. Did
anyone famous serve time there?
Quite a
few, actually. Probably the best known is Al Capone, the famous gangster. In
addition, well-known bank robber Willie Sutton was incarcerated at ESP during
the 1930s and 1940s and even participated in one of the penitentiary’s most
notable escapes. Importantly, the prison was also a tourist destination,
attracting visitors such as Charles Dickens and the Prince of Wales (later King
Edward VII).
7. Have
any prisoners successfully escaped?
The depends on what you mean
by “successfully.” If you mean “got outside the prison,” the answer is “yes,
quite a few.” If you mean “were never recaptured,” that is an issue of some
dispute. The prison recognizes only a single individual – Leo Callahan – who
was not recaptured. However, in my research for Eastern State Penitentiary: A History, I came across several
newspaper stories about inmates escaping and nothing about them ever being
recaptured. Because of this, and because of the often fragmentary nature of the
penitentiary’s records, I’m skeptical that Callahan was the only one who “got
away with it.”
8. What
do you think is the answer for America being the incarceration capital of the
world?
Stop sending so many people
to prison and improve economic and educational opportunities for poor
Americans. The vast majority of people sent to Eastern State Penitentiary
during its operational history were convicted of non-violent crimes (theft,
forgery, etc.); almost all of these people were poor and faced significant barriers
to supporting themselves economically.
Add to that “get tough on crime” measures like mandatory minimums and
harsh sentences for drug possession and what you get is a recipe for our
current predicament.
9. Do you
have any family or friends that worked in law enforcement or were in prison?
No.
10. As a
historian, what draws you to studying one thing over another?
That’s an interesting
question. I am interested in policy and politics, and my work reflects that. My
first two books – Eastern State
Penitentiary: A History and Seminary
of Virtue: The Ideology and Practice of Inmate Reform at Eastern State
Penitentiary, 1829-1971 – were attempts to understand the evolution of
America’s criminal justice system. My third book, The Homestead Strike: Labor, Violence, and American Industry, was
an attempt to better understand the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements
by exploring one of the most famous labor disputes in U.S. history. My fourth
book, The Bank War: Andre Jackson,
Nicholas Biddle, and the Fight for American Finance, explored what I
considered to be a key tension in American politics: that between technocratic
competence and democratic accountability.
Another component in my work
is my interest in Pennsylvania’s history. Right now, I am working on a
narrative history of Philadelphia that will be published in 2020.
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