Quakers

History

Following the restoration of the British crown and resurgence of the Anglican Church in 1660, Quakers in England became increasingly subject to religious persecution and imprisonment. For nearly 20 years, Friends made frequent visits to jails and other places of confinement to offer both moral and material support to their incarcerated brethren. These experiences of confinement and state repression led many Quakers to become involved in prison reform.

Quakers helped to transform American punishment practices, outlawing torture and corporal punishment and restricting the use of the death penalty. William Penn's constitution for Philadelphia introduced principles of reform as the primary goal of punishment. Then, in 1787, prominent Quakers created the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons to provide food to local jail inmates and to lobby for large-scale reform and institution building. Later renamed the Pennsylvania Prison Society, the association urged major changes to the existing Walnut Street Jail, where the warden sold liquor to inmates, confined young offenders and female inmates with male convicts, exposing them to sexual exploitation, and failed to provide adequate food and clothing. Building on these efforts, the Prison Society worked in conjunction with other Protestants, architects, social reformers, and legislators to set out their ideas for the creation of the penitentiary. This new institution was meant to provide a new form of punishment, in which solitary confinement and hard labor gradually replaced execution and bodily mutilation in the United States.

At the same time as the emergence of the penitentiary in America, British Quakers, particularly evangelicals, were urging Parliament to restructure punishment in the United Kingdom as well. Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker minister and social reformer, raised the issue of prison reform to the national level with her campaigns to improve women inmates' poor living [Page 800]conditions. In 1813, Fry exposed the unsanitary and overcrowded conditions of Newgate Prison, a women's prison brimming with poverty, filth, and to Fry, “moral degradation” (in Barbour & Frost, 1988, p. 318). She opened a school inside the prison to teach women and their children to read and sew. Fry also established the Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners, read the Bible to inmates, delivered sermons, and encouraged Quakers and social reformers to visit inmates. She was instrumental in having female wardens introduced to run separate women's facilities.

The Penitentiary

American Quakers played a key role in the shift away from public execution, corporal punishment, and torture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They also developed the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, which quickly became the model for similar institutions in the United States and Europe. In order to reform inmates, the penitentiary isolated them in individual cells. Solitary confinement, Quakers believed, would encourage inmates to meditate upon their sins, recognize their errors, and seek redemption. Quakers combined these monastic elements with the hard labor of earlier workhouses to instill discipline in criminal offenders. They believed that the dual strategy of solitary confinement and hard labor would reform inmates and smooth their eventual reintegration into society.

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