Thank you.
We would like to take this time to thank everyone who has supported us in this project. We appreciate the help we have received from Professor Garcia, Dustin O'Hara, and the Charles E. Young Research Library staff. We are grateful to have learned many new skills and look forward to using them again in our near futures. We hope you enjoyed reading through our website as much as we enjoyed creating it!
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This source explores the role of education in the Eastern State Penitentiary, and its effect on the rehabilitation of the prisoners. The writer argues that education, both vocational and academic, plays a crucial part in penal reform, and it was those prisons that focused on penal form who hosted educational programs for its prisoners. Kahan supports this argument by providing evidence from Eastern State Penitentiary throughout the time period it was running for. This article is important in informing the lifestyle of the prisoners, and to some extent, their potential after their dispatch. With education so highly enforced at Eastern State Penitentiary, the prisoners are better equipped for the real world, and are able to leave knowing better. With missing data in the dataset, this article allows for a much better understanding of the prison and the characters of the prisoners. The article informs the difference between prisons at the time, as well as between prisons then and now.
McGuinness, Margaret M. "[About the Cover]: Visit Those in Prison." American Catholic Studies 120, no. 3 (2009): 91-98.
Link to article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/44195252
Margaret McGuinness argues about the pervasiveness in which Catholicism was prevalent at Eastern State Penitentiary and how religion became a big part of prisoners’ experiences. McGuinness cites the Catholic chaplain’s office as a source who not only confirms this story, but is also in the process of trying to preserving the story of the Eastern State Penitentiary. This article is very important to understanding how big of a role religion played in this prison and how that may have affected the judgement of the person writing the prisoners’ records. This not only affirms that Catholicism played a big role during this time, but also why some of the prisoners’ descriptions in the data set may be biased towards Catholics. Religion clearly played a part in how prisoners were identified and can help answer questions with our data set.
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Rubin, Ashley, and T. “Institutionalizing the Pennsylvania System: Organizational Exceptionalism, Administrative Support, and Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829-1875.” EScholarship, University of California, September 14, 2016.
This scholarly dissertation examines the Eastern State Penitentiary’s unique mode of confinement from 1829 to 1875. The researcher compares the unique Pennsylvania system and compares it to the ubiquitous standardized Auburn prison system formatting. The researcher’s main focus is to analyze how the Eastern State Penitentiary was able to maintain its institutionalized framework despite pressures of conformity to a different style of confinement. The research dives into how the Pennsylvania system was different due to separate confinement cells and institutionalized corrective processes including religion, workshop-style labor, and education. The research is backed by historical content analyses of archival materials exploring a wide range of primary-source documents related to the prison. This resource is important relative to our thesis because it allows us to see how and why the Eastern Penitentiary was unique compared to other confinements. In addition, by learning about these differences, we are able to further understand variables in our data set.
Sellin, Thorsten. "Philadelphia Prisons of the Eighteenth Century." Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 43, no. 1 (1953): 326-31. doi:10.2307/1005687.
Link to article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1005687?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
This article examines the history of prisons in Philadelphia in the Eighteenth Century, specifically focusing on the progression of their practices and build throughout the century. While this article does not center it’s argument around the Eastern State Penitentiary, it most definitely allows for a deeper insight to be grasped on the typicalities of Philadelphia Prisons. The historical evidence used in this article was primarily from secondary sources. This source is crucial in setting the context and background for the project. As there are missing pieces of information in the data, it is important to gain a full understanding to ensure not false assumptions are being made. This article helps to understand the differences between prisons in Philadelphia in the Eighteenth Century.
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Teeters largely discusses the elaborate design of the Eastern State Penitentiary to show how it reflects the nature of terror within this prison. Considered the most elaborate of its time, this prison created the system of separate isolation. Teeters explores all aspects of the prison further than just its architecture. He discusses the daily lives of prisoners, from the food they ate to their bathing schedules to their exercise routines in the yards outside. The article’s extensive discussion of the wardens keeping records is significant in showing the power dynamic of the prison system. Everything from the way the prison was built to the system of bathing and religious practices was to convince the government and society as a whole that complete separation was an effective practice. However, the official reports were written by the wardens of the prison, who often left information out as to prisoner punishments and problems within the system. Learning the history and context of this prison is helpful in determining these power dynamics as well as the successes and failures of Eastern State.
This source discusses the effect of the separate system of prison confinement, originally practiced in the Eastern State Penitentiary, on the rehabilitation of prisoners. Traditionally, prisoners were kept in communal cells, and regularly interacted with each other. The separate system isolated prisoners from one another in the belief that it was a more permanent form of punishment, as opposed to physical punishments for example, which tend to only inflicts immediate terror. In this way, the prison aimed to provide prisoners with a fresh start after their discharge as their misdeeds would be unknown to others. This system was soon followed by other prisons and increasingly became the norm. The evidence utilized for this source includes secondary sources, such as reports and journals, as well as manuscript records of the penitentiary. Overall, this article provides a much deeper insight into the lifestyle of prisoners at Eastern State Penitentiary, allowing better inferences to be made about the prisoners themselves. More specifically, given that there are many gaps in the data, better assumptions can be made on the characteristics of the prisoners and the prison based on the information in this article. Moreover, the employment of the separate system provides insight on the uniqueness of the prison, particularly because it was the first of its kind. Inevitably, these prisoners in particular have very characterizations given the environment they were put in. This article informs us on why records are different between this prison and others, as well as the prison structure. It also suggests the type of punishments practiced.