History of Religion in Prison

Penitentiary

The belief that it was possible to absolve sin through penance was the guiding principle of the early religious prisons and the origin of the term penitentiary. Jean Mabillon, a 17th-century French Benedictine monk, was the first to make use of the term penitentiary to designate the monastic prison in which the inmate was to spend his sentence for self-reform through spiritual contemplation and work in silence. Many of the early penitentiary practices, such as flogging and solitary confinement, were used in these religious prisons.

Quakers were the first to advocate prison reform in the United States based on religious principles. In 1787, the Philadelphia Quakers founded the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail opened in 1790 where religious services were an integral part of the program for prisoners. Although a number of states built prisons on this model, by the early 19th century atrocious conditions, including overcrowding and congregate living arrangements, prompted reformers to look to new methods and models of confinement. The modern penitentiary was born with the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (1829) and the Auburn Prison in New York (1819). Both prisons originally made use of solitary confinement for prisoners and were directed by rigid moralists and religious disciplinarians. Throughout the 19th century, most wardens of these prisons manifested at least outwardly a [Page 421]deep spiritual commitment. Moral instruction was primarily, if not solely, religious, and the prison directors waged a continuous war on sin and social evils.

Through the second quarter of the 19th century, the major champion of the Auburn system of congregate labor and solitary confinement was the puritan New Englander Louis Dwight. Dwight founded the Boston Prison Discipline Society in 1826. The membership of the society was composed largely of Congregational and Baptist ministers. Dwight believed firmly in stern discipline and the inculcation of religious ideas in convicts. Most prisons in the United States until the post–Civil War period followed this model, a model infused with a stern Calvinist idea of the wages of sin.

After the Civil War, American prisons were subjected to the methodology of the social sciences and the professionals who became practitioners in social engineering. But in no way was religion and especially religious rhetoric banished from the corridors of the prison. In fact, Enoch Wines, one of the leading lights of post–Civil War prison reform, who helped compile the ground-breaking Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada (1867), was a Protestant minister. Wines was one of the driving forces behind the National Prison Congress, held in Cincinnati in 1870. The congress, as summed up by Wines, strongly believed in the prison's role in the reformation of character. To accomplish this end, the congress recommended more productive labor, education, and religion in the prisons. The stated principles of the congress propounded reform through religion, education, and industrious work habits. The congress advocated social science methods, but methods still firmly based in religious belief.

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