Well, this last week I did something unusual on a vacation. I went to prison…
More in the extended entry…
Yes, I went to prison—Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, to be exact.
When I was a graduate student, the prison was an abandoned site and has since been in the process of reconstruction. When originally opened in 1829, it was one of the models of the new penal-reform movement, with isolated cells…
… and inside the one-person chambers ….
… one could find the things that prisoners would do to focus their mind on repentance and rehabilitation:
As many social historians have documented, this rehabilitative ideal quickly deteriorated, and Eastern State eventually became a mass warehouse, with long hallways in the cell blocks…
… and where the cells were no longer just for one person and where, if you were really lucky, you had two skylights instead of one.
And so one should not be too surprised that the great move for rehabilitative prisons (perhaps best known through Jeremy Bentham’s work, or maybe Foucault’s arguments about Bentham) ended up being far from rehabilitative. I only visited for an hour or two…
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