Prison Education

The Pennsylvania System

The first prison in the United States was run by Quakers in Philadelphia in 1791. They felt that solitude and the Bible would rehabilitate better than public humiliation or corporal punishment. The rehabilitative ideal affirms that the primary purpose of prison is to effect changes in the characters, attitudes, and behavior of convicted offenders, so as to strengthen the social defense against unwanted behavior, but also to contribute to the welfare and satisfactions of offenders. Education, predominantly religious in content, was seen as an integral part of this ideal and was incorporated in 1798. Quaker rehabilitation-based prisons became known as the Pennsylvania system. Later, in the 1820s, a competing system lacking an educational component, known as the Auburn system, was developed in New York State.

Alternative Systems

In the Pennsylvania system, prisoners were totally isolated except for nightly visits from a chaplain. This chaplain would provide reading lessons to facilitate the reading of the Bible. In the Auburn system, men labored together all day in total silence. The latter's founders believed that prisoners needed to be treated severely, producing terror and suffering, and they doubted that the prisoners were reformable. By the 1840s, the Pennsylvania system was losing popularity and the Auburn system was adopted by most states.

Toward the end of the 1800s, a different view of criminality emerged, spearheaded by Zebulon Brock-way. He felt that some of the blame for a criminal's behavior fell to society, stemming from environmental influences and poverty. Therefore, he believed that education could provide a regeneration of the individual as well as the individual's successful réintégration into society. This began the Reformatory era and the first ventures into postsecondary corrections education.

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