On April 22, 1794, an act passed in America that shaped the western penal system significantly - “those who for a second offense, previous capital, were sentenced to life or twenty-five years could be confined in the solitary cells for whatever periods the inspectors might determine.” This was a victory for the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisoners, who believed that separation within prisons would stimulate the prisoner’s conscience, and that he would be able to repent of his evil ways.
Philadelphia reformers were frustrated by the arrangements of the old Walnut Street Jail, which encouraged labor among the prisoners but did not utilize separate cells for all of their prisoners. They also disliked the Auburn system, in which any breach of discipline could be punished with the lash . People felt very strongly about the penitentiary system. Britain and France adopted the Pennsylvania system in the 1840s and 50s but abandoned it a few years later. Anyone who had an opinion on the prison system were polarized into groups that encouraged the reform and groups that abhorred it.
Architect John Haviland built the Eastern State Penitentiary around the principle that crime was directly related to the individual’s environment. George Washington Smith described the Eastern State Penitentiary as the most extensive building in the United States. It was indeed the most elaborate penitentiary at the time — seven cell blocks radiated from the rotunda, which was the central area of the prison, and cells were designed so that the maximum amount of room would be available. There were whitewashed cells and stone floors, though later wooden planks were laid over the stone. In 1831, shortly after opening, doors were built opening to the corridors so that the minister could breach near the central rotunda, and all the prisons would be able to hear his voice at one time.
Background
SENTENCING LOCATION FOR ESP PRISONERS
The map above shows the sentencing locations of the prisoners. Though the visualization does not represent the number of prisoners convicted at each location, it depicts the wide range of states that sent their convicts to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
​
On the other hand, the graph below does show the number of prisoners convicted at each location. It is no surprise that "Philadelphia" has the largest number of prisoners because the Eastern State Penitentiary is located in Philadelphia. This contextualizes the amount of crimes committed in various locations.
PRISONERS' ORIGINS BY NUMBER OF SENTENCES
Overview of Prisoners
The map on the left depicts the birthplaces of all the Eastern State Penitentiary prisoners in our dataset. As the reader zooms out, they can gradually see the enormous range of places where the convicts were born, hinting not only at the waves of European immigrants but also at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade.
CRIME BREAKDOWN
The tree map to the right is a visualization of the number of prisoners for each crime, with larceny being the most popular with 293 records and burglary second with 100. This allows us to see the complete breakdown of the volume of various crimes within the prison.
AVERAGE SENTENCE LENGTH AND OFFENSE
The table to the left shows a list of offenses and the average sentencing length in years. From looking at this, we see that the top three crimes to get the greatest sentencing lengths were rape, murder and poisoning. This allows us to visualize the offense that has the highest average sentencing length.
Entering the Prison
When the convict first arrived, he was first examined by the warden. Then he was taken to a room where he received simple clothes and a haircut, and the warden recorded physical attributes of the prisoner. He was then given a hood that he would have to wear whenever he had to walk through the prison . Prisoners wore these masks especially when they had to gather as a group, to conceal their identities and preserve a greater sense of separateness.
Within the prison, the chance to work was a privilege. Prisoner occupations included shoemaking, spinning, weaving, dyeing, dressing yarn, blacksmithing, carpentering, sewing, wheelwright, washing, wood turning, brush making, tin working, shuttle making, and last making. However, most prisoners were either shoe-makers or weavers. Prison food was relatively good in quality, quantity, and variety, but the lack of an efficient heating system and a clean water supply were two major problems in the early management of the Eastern State Penitentiary. In addition, sanitary conditions were terrible in the prison. Yet while the entire prison population was exposed to these health threats, there was a disparity in the death rates of black and white prisoners. Additionally, when prisoners did not act appropriately, they were to be given smaller rations of food as mild punishments. However, in practice, this disciplinary method was unsuccessful, and the warden had to rely on harsher methods.
​
In the report that Warden Wood gave to the Board of Inspectors at the end of 1830, prisoners were said to be industrious and that their work was earning their upkeep. However, he did not mention how there were quite a few prisoners who acted up, possibly because these prisoners were aware of and resisted the psychological persuasion the prison was trying to enforce. When smaller rations of food did not succeed in disciplining the prisoners, the warden turned to methods like locking the prisoner in a dark cell, placing the prisoner in a straitjacket, giving the prisoner a cold shower bath, beating the prisoner with a stick, placing the prisoner in a tranquilizing chair, and gagging the prisoner with an iron gag.
​
religion and literacy in the penitentiary
Under the solitary system, twelve years was the maximum permissible sentence, though most prisoners did not receive sentences this long. However, the warden complained that the courts gave sentences that were too light for any reformation in character. In addition, it was noted by prisoner William Parker during a testimony how “I have seen No. 4 sitting in center house alongside William Baen (a keeper or guard) reading newspapers. He was a white convict and had more privileges than any other prisoner — breathing the fresh air, walking about the yard on a Sabbath day particularly during divine services.”
The first three hundred prisoners were considered as test subjects of the system. 49% of these first three hundred prisoners were partially or wholly illiterate, which prison administrators overlooked and assumed that the withdrawal of work or books would have a profound impact on the prisoners. Administrators also believed that the lack of education and intemperance were principal causes of criminal behavior. The related assumption was that most criminals did not know how to work in trades that would let them live honestly, though this was not the case and many prisoners had already known valuable trade skills. Administrators had not considered that 85% of sentences for the first 300 prisoners involved theft or embezzlement of some kind, hinting at the economic duress prevalent in the 1830s.
Paul Kahan argues that “the institution’s various administrative regimes shared a commitment to penal education despite the wide philosophic differences between them.” He highlights the shift in “penal ideology regarding prison education from the tight link between religion and education in the Jacksonian era to the emphasis on vocational training during the post-Civil War era.” Specifically for the Eastern State Penitentiary, Catholicism was tied very closely to education. According to Margaret McGuinness, “when the method of incarceration changed in the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a need for a more formal religious structure that took into account the denominational preferences of the various groups within the prison’s population.”
PRISONER RELIGIOSITY BREAKDOWN
Although we were fascinated by the relationship between religion and prisoner sentencing, the lack of information from the dataset restricted us from constructing meaningful visualizations. Over 95% of the prisoners did not have religious beliefs stated in their records and despite our efforts to extract the salvageable information regarding religion, our visualizations created below only accounts for 5% of the prisoners, and are therefore not reliable for interpretation. This shows that religion only began to play a bigger part in the prisoners’ lives after they entered the prison, as the records of their religion prior to this was neglectfully recorded.
As the visualization shows, an overwhelming majority of the prisoners were not recorded as being religious. The paucity of documented religious prisoners in the data set means that we are unable to make generalizable conclusions about the effect of religion on prisoners’ sentence length. However, examination of descriptions of individual inmates provides a more nuanced understanding of prisoner religiosity. In multiple instances, prisoners who were not noted as being religious were in fact observed to exhibit some religious behavior:
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
In other cases, prisoners identified themselves as being religious, but the prison wardens making observational notes disagreed with this identification, and they were not recorded as being religious.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
These examples of prisoner descriptions suggest that more prisoners may have been religious, or adopted some religious practices, than is explicitly stated in the data set. Yet, even with this insight, classification is still difficult: should prisoners who perform some religious act, despite only on occasion, or those who perform some acts but not others, be considered religious? Should prisoners who self-identify as religious be classified as religious, or should they be deemed non-religious as per the wardens’ observations?
The data set does not provide the necessary information to answer these questions. As such, we can only conjecture that religion was a prominent aspect in the lives of more prisoners than the records clearly note, and that this may have had some impact on their prison experience. We acknowledge that such gaps in concrete information regarding prisoner religion, as well as the inherent issues in classification due to disparities between self-identification and third party-identification of religiosity, are limitations of our data set. Learn more about the nature and limitations of our data.
George Kunkle, 24, convicted of larceny:
“Seems deeply affected by the condition in which his crime has placed him, appears to have some conviction of sin. Prays often through the day, [his] mother [is a] member of Church in Reading. Now in Engine House.”
Christian Clapfer, 20, convicted of horse stealing:
“A very ingenious man, professes to be the subject of grace, conversant with scripture and doctrine of grace. Mind of great native strength, strong perceptive intellect. Anxious to improve it by study.”
Henry Bonefong, 19, convicted of larceny:
“Young man Barkeeper in a tavern and oyster house. Injured by associations there. Serious and anxious for religious instruction. Prays daily but ineffectually, prays at random. Expresses thankfulness for my visits. Seemed suddenly to obtain a real knowledge of the way of salvation and professed hope in Christianity a few weeks previous to his discharged.”
James Stewart, 50, convicted of selling counterfeit money:
“Professes religion. Is quite an intelligent and venerable looking man, has been judge of a county court. Converses well on religious subjects but seems not altogether at ease when any questions are proposed respecting himself. Profession of religion evidently false.”
George M. Roberts, 26, convicted of larceny:
"A curious person, quite sure that he is converted and that he is a very religious man. Quite mistaken in his impressions."
PRISONER LITERACY BREAKDOWN
We started by exploring the literacy rate of the prisoners to see if there were any bias towards highly educated prisoners. We wanted to analyze if prisoners were being treated differently based on their education level, so we explored the correlation between prisoners' literacy rates and their sentencing length. The chart on the left shows the breakdown of prisoners by literacy rate, with the majority of the prisoners being literate and only one-third of the prisoners being illiterate. This shows that there may be no significant biases towards convicting more illiterate criminals. Through this graph, we can see that prisoners were not discriminated against based on their literacy, at least during the time before they entered the prison system.
LITERACY AND AVERAGE SENTENCING LENGTH
Due to the fact that there are more literate than illiterate prisoners, an averaging of the sentencing length was needed to accurately explore the correlation between literacy and sentence length. The chart on the right compares the average sentencing length with literacy, and we can see that prisoners who are literate actually have a higher average sentence length when compared to those who are illiterate. This suggests that literacy doesn’t play a part in the amount of years the prisoners are sentenced to.
LITERACY AND SENTENCING LENGTH
We then explored the prisoner's Literacy rate and Sentence length, in the bar chart above, literacy is broken down into two strips between "No Literacy" and "Yes Literacy", whilst the frequency of Sentence Length is shown on the Y-Axis and the Sentence Length is shown on the X-Axis. From the chart, we can see that both strips showed similar distribution, with the majority of Sentences being 2-3 years, indicating that literacy may not have played a significant bias in Sentencing Length. We can see that there doesn’t seem to be a significant correlation between the initial time that prisoners were sentenced to stay at the prison and their literacy.
Though our initial exploration of literacy in our dataset yielded no correlations between literacy and sentence length, there is an interesting relationship between literacy and actual time served. We further cleaned our data so that we could compare the actual sentence length of a prisoner to their original sentence length. By isolating the data of the prisoners who were freed earlier and analyzing their attributes, we were able to glean a more complicated connection among literacy, religiosity, and sentence length than our previous study uncovered.
LITERACY OF EARLY RELEASED PRISONERS
The chart above displays the literacies of the prisoners who were released early and demonstrates a clear distinction between literacy and sentence length that our previous study did not reveal. The fact that there is no correlation between initial sentence and literacy suggests that there is no clear bias in a convict’s education level in the court. However, this chart indicates that there are four times more prisoners who were literate and released early than prisoners who were illiterate and released early, indicating that convicts with a higher education level had an advantage in adjusting to the penitentiary’s reformation program than less educated convicts. There are quite a few possible reasons for this — perhaps the administration looked more favorably upon those who were better educated; or perhaps more literate convicts had greater knowledge of scripture, which was looked upon favorably; or perhaps literacy’s connection to social class influenced the administration to release some prisoners earlier.
BREAKDOWN OF PRISONER OFFENSE, ORIGINAL SENTENCE LENGTH, AND ACTUAL SENTENCE LENGTH
In the chart above, the identities of the prisoners who were released early are displayed with their offense and a breakdown of their original sentence length and actual sentence length. Some prisoners, like Clark or Dahoff, left only a year or two earlier than their original sentence length. Other prisoners, like Walton, were released several years earlier. The perceived severity of their offenses do not seem to affect how early they are released. That is, the penitentiary did not calculate how early a prisoner would be released based on the severity of their crime. Rather, they measured a prisoner’s qualification for freedom with a different criterion.
​
In the case of Walton, who was convicted for poisoning and who was initially sentenced for seven years in prison but released after two years, his description states:
​
"Attempted the life of his wife, had indulged in licentious intercourse previous to marriage and knew that others also had. Was obliged unwillingly to marry her and hated her. Is unwilling to live with her. Never knew anything of the word of God or the guilt of sin, until he learned it from the Bible in prison. Seems very serious and prayerful and I hope the lord will effectually renew his soul. May 8th have strong reason to hope he has been made a subject of renewing grace."
​
Meanwhile, Walton's discharge note states:
​
"Pardoned and discharged June 20th 1839 of the conversion of this prisoner I have no doubt"
​
Walton is the Eastern State Penitentiary's model prisoner. Sentenced to prison after living a life of sin after sin, Walton encounters the scripture within the penitentiary's modest walls and undergoes a dramatic transformation in his character and, more importantly, his soul. Having successfully been reprogrammed by Eastern State, Walton is allowed to rejoin society as a free man after two years instead of seven.
​
Thus, the connection of both literacy and religiosity to sentence length is not necessarily obvious within our dataset but is nonetheless evident. This connection is significant because it informs how we can understand the ideology of Eastern State at the time. In the early 19th century in ESP, prisoners were not necessarily judged by their crimes as much as they were by their souls.
​
This points to other possible biases that can be further explored using text analysis.
Text Analysis of Descriptions
MOST COMMON WORDS USED IN PRISONER DESCRIPTIONS
The word cloud shows the words most frequently used in the 'Description' section of the prisoner records; the larger the size of the word, the more times it was used in the section. Many of the most common words are related to religion and literacy: religion, god, salvation, sin, read, prays, Catholic. Other common words are adjectives describing the character of a prisoner: hardened, hopeful, ignorant. This suggests that characteristics to do with prisoner religiosity and literacy that were observed about the prisoners were used to make judgments about their moral character. Judgments based on literacy are reflected in shortened service times, although we can only posit that there were similar manifestations for judgments based on religiosity.
Scroll the 'Terms' bar left to right to see word clouds with more words
Despite the good intent behind the reform for the prison system, Eastern State Penitentiary was not able to meet many of its ideals. The death rate at Philadelphia was around twice that as Auburn. Some blamed solitary confinement, but it is also suggested that this is because at Auburn, prisoners were pardoned when their disabilities became severe or their illnesses terminal. Furthermore, administrations disregarded legislation and saw themselves as the proper authority on penological matters. Ashley Rubin argues that it was the status identity and imperative created by the Pennsylvania System that made it valuable to ESP’s administrators, and that by the 1870s, since the debate no longer mattered by then, there was no need to defend the system anymore. Overcrowding made it more and more difficult to separate the prisoners throughout the years, and eventually the principle of separating the prisoners was abandoned. The penitentiary closed in 1970. It is now a U.S. National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a museum.
conclusion
The aim of this project was to analyze Eastern State Penitentiary records, in hopes that doing so would reveal novel insights into the prison experience under the separate system. Review of previous literature on the Penitentiary led us to identify religion and literacy as particularly emphasized characteristics of the inmates, upon which we derived our prediction that prisoners who were religious and/ or literate would be treated more favorably than their non-religious and/ or illiterate counterparts, and thus receive shorter sentences. While we found that religion and literacy did not directly impact sentence length, we did discover that there was a correlation between literacy and actual time prisoners served: those who were literate were far more likely to serve less time than that of their full sentence.
Main Findings:​​
1
THERE IS NO SIGNIFICANT CORRELATION BETWEEN LITERACY AND SENTENCE LENGTH. HOWEVER, THERE IS A RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LITERACY AND SERVING LESS TIME THAN THE FULL SENTENCE.
THE LACK OF ACCOUNTS OF RELIGIOUS PRISONERS MEANS WE CANNOT CONCLUDE ANYTHING ABOUT THE EFFECT OF PRISONER RELIGIOSITY ON THEIR PRISON EXPERIENCES. HOWEVER, IT SEEMS THAT MORE PRISONERS WERE RELIGIOUS (TO VARYING EXTENTS) THAN THE DATA SET EXPLICITLY STATES.
2
3
PRISONER EXPERIENCES WERE SIGNIFICANTLY SHAPED BY THE JUDGMENTS THAT THE ADMINISTRATORS/AUTHORITIES MADE ABOUT THEIR MORAL CHARACTERS, LITERACY, RELIGION. FOR EXAMPLE, SOME WHO WERE LITERATE WERE DEEMED HIGHLY MORAL, LEADING TO THEIR EARLY RELEASE FROM ESP.