Be seated. Announcer you are watching American History tv 40 hours of programming on American History every weekend on cspan3. Follow us on twitter for information on our schedule of upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. Each week, American History tvs american artifacts takes you to museums and historic basis. Opened in 1829, philadelphias eastern state penitentiary operated as a prison until 1971. Now a museum, we visited to learn about the history that coined the term penitentiary and tried to reform criminals. Guide my name is nick, a tour guide at eastern state penitentiary. Today, we will spend the next hour looking at this beautiful building. This is today an estate of in a state of stabilized ruins. This is after 142 years used as a prison, which, when it first opened in 1829, was considered experimental. It was a brandnew type a of prison. It was so revolutionary they did not want to call it a prison. They invented a new word penitentiary. The root is penitent. This is the first attempt at the humane treatment of a criminal. A very quaker inspired idea that deep down everybody was perfectly good. In this building, that person would have a chance to reflect on their life and become penitent, to reform themselves through that feeling. A great question is, how do you make someone penitent . How do you make someone confront some of those decisions they had made . Well spend a lot of time inside the cells addressing that. While were out here, take a quick look around, i want to show you some of the architecture of this place. When it first opened in 1829 the architecture of the the architect of the building, a young british man won a 100 prize to design the thing. He wanted to look hundreds of he wanted this to look hundreds of years older than it was. He went with the gothic revival style. The battlementse. Even the imposingness of the stone facade, you have to imagine this the way a philadelphian would have in the 1800s. First off, you would hopefully be seeing it from two miles away. The city today is totally surrounding the entire prison, but when it first opened, this was acres of open farmland all around. Imagine that you are in that smaller city. You look up to you would look at the largest public structure on the continent. It was supposed to intimidate. All of the castlelike elements are supposed to make us think about one of the things we associate with the castle authority, dungeon, torture. Imagine what happens in the basement of the castle. Interesting that the inside of what was happening here was this new attempt at humane punishment. When the outside was a harsh and intimidating kind of look towards the outside. It is also, as far as castles go, totally safe. Totally fake. Those battlements are kneehigh. They are not going to help in any kind of siege. All along the outside of the perimeter, you will see arrow slit windows, but they do not go through the wall. There is no temperature temperature aperture on the inside. Again, just for the look of the thing, rather than the actual function. But i want to bring us around the way, show you more of the architecture outside. Im going to head just up this way. Watch your step. It is very icy out. I am going to bring us into the corner here, just to give you a sense of the scale of this place. 10. 5 acres. The perimeter wall, you can get a sense of. 30 feet high. It goes another 10 feet deep. This is almost 8 feet thick. This goes for halfmile all away around the site. So, not just the largest but i want to stress this this was the most expensive thing, one of the United States had ever built. The only more expensive building on the continent was the capitol dome in d. C. As far as public structures go. This tells us a lot about the priorities of these early pennsylvanians. This was the major project. It was 8 times over its budget. And they kept building. They were committed toward this new idea, just to try something new as far as crime and punishment compared to what they had been doing. But we are going to head inside of cellblock one. Come on in. This is cellblock one from 1829. It is by todays standards kind of gloomy. But back then, this was considered beautifully well lit for 19th century standards. Every cell had its own skylight. So, we said the outside architecture resembled kind of this gothic revival castle. You see the inside is more cathedrallike. A lot of these early ideas penitence very religiously inspired. This is when crime was equated with sin. A lot of these ideals of penitence are built into the building. We will see more of that as we go through. Before we focus on what eastern state was doing, take a look at prisons before. This is what we are trying to not do. This is an illustration of newgate prison in london. William penn spent time here when he was a reckless quaker on the town. Wallet jail might have been even worse. You get a sense of everything going on. Total chaos. Fighting. What we think about as Correctional Officers today did not exist back then. It does not matter if someone was, picked someones pockets or stabbed someone to death everyone was in the same room , together. The artist did not draw the open sewer. Disease was probably. Disease was prevalent. Typhus was so common they called it jail fever. You did not have to worry if you had money. Prisons would have a separate area for the aristocracy. But if someone did not have money or did not have family to support them for their time in prison, they might not eat. In many of these prisons, food was not provided. You had to purchase it. This was way different than what we think about prison today. Today, prison is the punishment. Back then, jails were the waiting area. This is where someone would be held pretrial. In the meantime, if they want to dance on the table or play ball or gamble, i love this as an example. Walnut street jail had a bar in it. If you did not have enough money, you could sell your clothes for liquor. You can imagine the environment people were housed in. Of course, the trial would occur in the punishment, again, not time. It would be maybe a fine, an execution for serious crimes banishment occasionally, but much more commonly physical punishment. There are some examples we have illustrated along the wall. Whipping very common. The state loved it. It was easier to scale. The worse the crime was, the more times the criminal would be beaten. Then they are free to go. Branding. This is another painful one. But you can see, i mean, the pain of being burnt with a hot iron was not the real punishment. The real punishment was branding, the mark that lasted forever. Sometimes on the face indicating criminal. Compare that to the ideas here about trying to change someone. Very different approach. Stockades pillories. , this is more about public humiliation. If you are familiar with philadelphia, there is a beautiful park called logans square. You could bring your whole family to have an entertaining evening of throwing rocks at criminals or catch a public hanging. Pennsylvania was the first state to say maybe we do not want to do that outside. So this was it. This was our criminal Justice System. It had some quirks that reformers were looking at. Prisons were filthy, filing, overcrowded. The punishments were not seen as the punishments the punishments were starting to be seen as cruel and unusual. This is a bigger issue pretty this is a bigger issue. You can imagine lets say there , is a young firsttime offender. They get arrested, they spent a few weeks in walnut street jail. Hanging out with criminals they , are getting drunk, catching typhus, hanging out with criminals, they get whipped. You can imagine what that persons life is like afterwards. There is no incentive to reform. Not only are they going to go back to their old ways, but they consider prisons and area where you can learn new crimes. Tricks of the trade networking, right . These guys want to switch it up. If you visit philadelphia, you will get acquainted with ben franklin. He was so active in civic life. He invites some wealthy philadelphians over to his place. I love the name of the group they come up with. The Philadelphia Society for alleviating the miseries of public prisons. Along. Today it is still around called the pennsylvania prison society. We are looking at the First Organization in the world dedicated to prison reform. This is shortly before franklin was involved with helping to write what became the bill of rights. That language about cruel and unusual punishment, we see that in the 8th amendment. They had a new idea for how a prison could run but they would need a very expensive, custombuilt prison. The idea that they had it took them 30 years to convince the state. It is called the separate system. And all of the architecture and technology in this building was designed around the idea. So, instead of dozens of people tossed together, at eastern state penitentiary one prisoner would spend the entire sentence, an average of two to 8 years in this cells. They would never leave. They would never see another prisoner. And they had to serve the time in absolute silence. Again, the goal was penitence. How do you make someone penitent . There was this inspired belief that the innate goodness of a person, if you seal away the evils of the outside world, it would return to that goodness. After a few hours, never more than a few days they would ask , for something to do. A book was provided. You can probably guess which the one. Bible. And no other books. No reading material outside of that. No newspapers. Not even letters. No personal visits from friends or family. But it was not pure isolation. They had a few professional visits. The moral instructor would drop by. Today it sounds quaint. In prisons today, we have caseworkers and psychiatrist. That got started here. Same thing with jobtraining. It is something we see in practically every prison today. Once a month at eastern state, a professional would come, give the prisoner the materials they needed to learn the craft or a trade. Cellblock one is the shoemaking cellblock. There was another one for weaving furniture making, cigar , rolling. A simple idea, but just, again the hope is in here, they are going to have this quiet reflective time. They are going to learn how to become a new person and leave with a set of job skills and get a job and become a tax paper. Taxpayer. These were amazingly high ideals for that yeah, and when it first point. Opened there was a lot of hope for the wave was going to go this way. You can maybe get a sense of what happened. When it first opened, the entire world sat up and took notice of philadelphia. Foreign dignitaries from as far away from china were being sent to the city for the first time with the expressed purpose of studying this building. Part of it was this new idea of penitence but much of it was actually in architecture and technology. This was really, there are some architectural historians that consider eastern state penitentiary the first modern building in the world on account of its largescale environmental systems. Every cell had running water. Every cell had a flush toilet. You can see in this diagram it connect we central so that runs under our feet today. This building had central heating in 1829. Even the warden was required to live in that front gate house. He did not have a toilet. They did not think of it as a luxury. It was the answer to how to keep someone isolated. They wanted no distractions in that little crucible of penitence so that they could focus on their own personal path of betterment. Every cell even had its own private, attached backyard. Hours a day locked inside. 23 they were allowed for two and half hours for fresh air and sunlight. It was almost like a little dog run off the back of each cell. These had bare dirt floors. If a prisoner wanted to garden it was encouraged. The physician thought it was therapeutic. Some prisoners even kept birds and rabbits. I read about one prisoner growing peaches to supplement his meals. The meals were not bad. Three meals a day delivered into the cell. Meat, sometimes cocoa, sometimes coffee. If all you heard about was the peaches and cocoa and gardens, you would be like, this place is amazing. If all you heard about was the silence and enforced isolation, you would think that this was the most terrible prison ever built. But the fact it was both means this was an entirely new type of punishment. This is why it took so long to convince them to build it. They had to say, listen, do not expect anyone to change lastingly unless you take your material needs first. Only then, will the prisoner be able to focus on the spiritual discipline. That they were trying to get people to address in here. Brandnew ideas for this time. This is another curiosity. You can see this prisoner here is hooded. He has got an officer, called a keeper. Being led through the backyard into the cell. Whenever were moved around, they were hooded. So they cannot see anyone else. It ups that feeling of isolation. They also cannot see the building. It is disorienting. If you are trying to escape, you come out of the cell, what is the first thing you see . It is totally quiet. Now what . But here is a curiosity. We have hoods with eye holes. What is the purpose if they can see the building or other prisoners . This is a new idea here. The hoods were to preserve the anonymity of the prisoner. They were only identified by a n inmate number. The hope was only a handful of people would know they had served time. After the time at eastern state, the hope was they would go and have a fresh start somewhere. Compare that to being branded on the face and known as a thief the rest of your life. Or today a felony conviction will show up on student loan applications or Housing Assistance applications. These were brandnew ideas for that time. But im going to show you the inside of one of these cells of the early system here. Much of the building we are keeping in the state of stabilized decay. This area you can see, we actually restored a cell to what it wouldve looked like in that early separate system. Wood floors, that gate would have led to that backyard. There are these curious half doors on the outside here. The first three cellblocks they built they did not bother putting doors to the inside. Prisoners were brought into the back door. This was a feeding window. Food and work materials would be passed through an iron drawer, trying to cut down on human contact. Imagine if your meal slides in silently. If you did not clean it, by the time it was retracted, you would not get your next meal. So, on paper, everything sounds great. But in practice, the separate system had so many issues with it. Imagine today in a prison who mops the floors. Who does the maintenance . It is prisoners. Who was supposed to do that if everyone is locked in, learning Cottage Industries . They just broke the rules. Prisoners were brought out to work in the kitchen, in the laundry. The first warden, sandalwood samuel woulod, really wanted a butler. So he took a prisoner out of isolation. William hamilton becomes his personal server. Servant. He was the first person to escape. If everything happened according to plan, it would be a strict prison. But in actuality, it was impossible to maintain. Lets take a look inside one of the cells up the way here. So, these two cells are open. Take a step inside. Watch your head here. So, you can hear out echoey it is. Part of that was the silence. Any noise would be punished. The entire place was whisper quiet. The officers were told to put socks on over there boots. If you were in your backyard your neighbors were not. The food carts had leather padded wheels you would never hear it coming. They did not want inmates shouting over the walls. I should mention, what we see in the cell today, this became in the 1930s, one of the maximumsecurity units. So the bed frame is bolted to the ground. The toilets this is a modern toilet encased in concrete. No one could smash it and have shards as a weapon. And access to the backyards, they eventually started using the backyard spaces for other things. And the entryways to them were sealed up. So, we are looking at a lot of layers of the prison through decades of history. Lets head on back out this way. Pretty spacious in there. Compared to other prisons at that time, especially. And also designed for one. Add in the backyard, that was a lot of space. A lot of expense, but this prison, the separate system had so many different problems built in. One was, i mean, you can imagine what happens if you keep someone alone in silence for years. Not exactly mentally healthy. And that silence rule was being broken so frequently. They were trying to be humane but the punishments were, well they escalated quickly. It starts they would take a meal away. Then they would take yard time away. If a prisoner could not stop talking or trying to communicate with other people. They were learning, shouting down the toilet. Throwing notes into adjacent yards. They had something called the iron gag. Think of it like a horses bit. It has a chunk of metal to depress the tongue. It locks around the back of the head with chains. In 1833, there was one death in the prison. A prisoner serving 12 years for murder choked in the iron gag. Choked to death. It prompted an investigation. The inspection came in here. They were addressing a number of different whistleblower complaints about the warden. It turns out the place was going not according to plan. That inspection learned prisoners were regularly allowed out of the separate system. They found out the wife of one of the officers was throwing parties in the front gate house and inviting the prisoners. It was chaos. And then they also found out this issue with the Mental Health of solitary confinement. Starting to not admit that it was a problem but certainly addressing it. Problem solved itself. They did not have to worry about the effects of isolation when they had to worry about overcrowding. As early as 12 years in, they ran out of cells. The entire prison was billed for solid built for solitary confinement but now they had to have two or three or five to a cell. This is two cells joined together. At the highest peak of population, there were seven prisoners in one cell. So, all of these reasons for building the prison, this penitentiary to separate someone from the challenges of being with another person, they did not have to worry about disease or violence or contraband or criminal ideas being passed around. Suddenly they are right back to where they started. So, this was for decades in the late 1800s, this separate system was unraveling. Until 1913, they admit the separate system was broken. Again, looks great on paper. In practice, it was unworkable. Expensive to build and run mentally unhealthy, and then so overcrowded they could not keep everyone separate anyway. The prison changes. I want you to imagine this place in the 20th century. Much closer to what we think of prisons today. Prisoners have a cellmate. They are allowed to talk. Instead of eating and working alone in a cell they eat in the mess ha