State Prison System

History

In 1790, the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia provided the first separate housing of long-term prisoners in a cellblock called the “penitentiary house.” The Pennsylvania legislature then authorized two new prisons: the Eastern State Penitentiary (also called Cherry Hill) in Philadelphia and the Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh. Western opened in 1826, while Eastern began accepting prisoners in 1829. In the Pennsylvania system, prisoners entered and exited the prison wearing hoods to conceal their identities. They were isolated in large “outside” cells where they worked, ate, and slept alone, doing penance for their crimes. The prisons had interior corridors or gangways with the cells on the outside walls, each with a door to a small exercise area.

The state of New York developed the “Auburn” or “congregate” system with the opening of Auburn Penitentiary in 1817. In contrast to the segregation of prisoners in the Pennsylvania system, the Auburn system housed prisoners in small “inside” cells arranged on tiers with corridors along the outside walls. The convicts were marched every day to the mess hall for meals and to work sites. Auburn was infamous for enforcing strict and harsh discipline. The prisoners wore striped uniforms and were required to walk in lockstep, with each man holding the shoulder of the convict in front of him while maintaining absolute silence. Convicts were disciplined with flogging, beatings, and confinement in “the hole”—in solitary confinement.

The Auburn system was widely adopted across the country because of the economic efficiency it provided to house more prisoners in less space. Large penitentiaries were built in which hundreds of prisoners were concentrated in huge cellblocks. This allowed for prisons to develop vocational and industrial work programs at which the convicts would spend their day hours and then return to their cells.

States developed specialized prisons to incarcerate different populations. The first reformatory for young men was Elmira Reformatory, opened in 1876 in New York. The idea of separating young from older men spread, as 17 more states opened reformatories between 1876 and 1913. At the same time, many states opened separate prisons for women.

Following the Civil War, Southern states did not build Pennsylvaniaor Auburn-style penitentiaries. Instead they developed a brutal convict lease system in which former slaves were imprisoned and then rented back to plantation owners. Convicts were also kept on large prison farms (e.g., Angola in Louisiana) and used as labor in mines and on chain gangs to drain swamps and build roads.

In the 20th century, Northern states built large industrial prisons where convicts worked in factories. During the Great Depression (1929–1940), federal and state government passed legislation prohibiting state prisons from producing merchandise that competed with free labor. The Federal Bureau of Prisons retained an exception whereby prisoners could produce items for government use. Federal prisoners manufactured and assembled goods for the military during World War I and II.

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