Changes in Prisons

Changes in Prisons BY Logrolling Changes in Prison The American Correction system has been in existence for over 130 years. It has been since the meeting of American Prison Congress on 1870 in Cincinnati, Ohio. (Allen, Latest & Ponder, 2013, p 30-31) The reformation was totally encompassing the inmate's life in prison. The minds that met in 1870 were ahead of their times. With having put accountability and standards in the prison system created an improvement for the prisoner and the term he/she served. The beginnings were in Philadelphia at the Old Stone Jails on Third and Market Streets.

Its purpose was to hold debtors, and others awaiting trial. It has come a long way from the origins of the first Jails of the American Revolutionary however faltering in different fashions. The Jails were inadequate facilities. Inmates were lumped together male and female. A new Jail was erected in Walnut Street. This new Jail became the first state prison in Pennsylvania. The state prison had created separate cells for the various inmates. It also instilled different punishment in accordance with the crime.

Walnut Street prison had implemented new workshops to educated prisoners with useful employment. Nonstop, Ph. D. , 2012) Walnut Street prison set up was the ideal make up for the moment. The state prison was the foundation for many more prisons to be built in the same fashion. Because of the rapidly growing population, a new Jail was begun in 1773 on Walnut Street, behind the State House (later, Independence Hall). The new prison had the traditional layout of large rooms for the inmates. Initially, conditions were little better than they had been at the old Jail.

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Prisoners awaiting trial might barter their clothes for liquor or be forcibly stripped upon entering by other inmates seeking funds for the bar. The result was great suffering when the weather turned cold. One estimate stated that 20 gallons of spirits were brought into the prison daily by the Jailer for sale to the inmates. It was also considered a common practice for certain women to arrange to get arrested to gain access to the male prisoners. After the peace of 1783, a group of prominent citizens led by Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush and others organized a movement to reform the harsh penal code of 1718.

The new law substituted public labor for the previous severe punishments. Members of the Society were shocked by what they learned about the new Walnut Street prison. The next year they presented to the state legislature an explanation of their investigations of the conditions. They recommended solitary confinement at hard labor as a remedy and reformative strategy. An act of 1790 brought about sweeping reforms in the prison and authorized a penitentiary house with 16 cells to be built in the yard of the Jail to carry out solitary confinement with labor for "hardened atrocious offenders. Walnut Street Jail, by the same legislation, became the first state prison in Pennsylvania. Following 1790, the Walnut Street Jail became a showplace, with separation of different sorts of prisoners and workshops providing useful trade instruction. The old abuses and idleness seemed eliminated, but with Walnut Street now a state prison and the population of Philadelphia increasing rapidly, it, like its previous Jail, became unbearably crowded. The large rooms, 18 feet square, which still housed most of the prisoners, by 1795, had between 30 and 40 occupants each.

The Prison Society continued to urge the creation of large penitentiaries for the more efficient handling of prisoners. The reformers also remained convinced that in spite of the small-scale isolation cellulose at Walnut Street, that site would never prove the value of the system of separate incarceration which came to be called the Pennsylvania System. Only an entire larger structure, built specifically to separate inmates from one another, would be needed. Legislation was finally passed on March 20, 1821, and eleven commissioners were appointed by the governor.

Among them was Samuel Wood, later to be the first warden of the prison. All but three of the building commissioners were either members of the Pennsylvania Prison Society or had revered on the board of inspectors of the Walnut Street Jail. Members of the Prison Society felt that the solution to the disorder and corruption in most prisons and even at the Walnut Street Jail lay in complete separation of each inmate for his or her entire sentence, a system which had been tried occasionally in England but was always abandoned because of costs and inadequate prison structures.

The small "penitentiary house" of 16 cells at Walnut Street Jail had ended up being used mostly for hard core prisoners and as punishment for infractions of prison rules. What was deed was a solely new kind of prison on a large scale. In 1822, work began on what was to become Eastern State Penitentiary, although at the time it was called Cherry Hill because it moved a cherry orchard. Despite not being finished, the prison opened in 1829.

Completed in 1836, it turned out to be one of the largest structures in the country at the time and was higher than preliminary cost estimates. Each prisoner was to be provided with a cell from which they would rarely leave and each cell had to be large enough to be a workplace and have attached a small individual exercise yard. Cutting edge technology of the asses and asses was used to install conveniences unmatched in other public buildings: central heating (before the U. S.

Capitol); a flush toilet in each cell (long before the White House was provided with such conveniences); shower baths (apparently the first in the country). The system of 24-hour separation of each prisoner coupled with in-cell feeding, work and sometimes vocational instruction, came to be known as the Pennsylvania System or Separate System, and remained the official position of the Pennsylvania Prison Society throughout the 19th century, although the system and its unusual architecture -? a central hub and baking celluloses -? were seldom imitated in other states.

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