Walnut Street Jail

Quakers and Prison Reform

The Philadelphia Quakers were instrumental in the establishment of this new prison. Earlier, the work of Richard Wistar and the Philadelphia Society for Assisting Distressed Prisoners, established in 1776, reflected the Quaker practice, exemplified in the life of Elizabeth Fry, of prison visitation. The members brought food and clothing to inmates in the jail and provided both physical comfort and spiritual support. The later Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, formed in 1787, was a reform-oriented organization with ties to the work of John Howard and similar groups in England. It included in its membership leading Quakers and other members of the political elite of Pennsylvania who were concerned with issues of public order after the disruption of the Revolutionary War and early nation building. While the society stressed the need for religious services and humane oversight of conditions in the jail, a major thrust of its work was the movement from public punishment to the use of the prison, in particular the reformative value of solitary confinement, as a means of penance and punishment.

Prison Conditions

In the remodeling of the Walnut Street Jail in 1790 to add a “penitentiary house,” two floors of solitary cells were constructed on arches above the ground level. Each floor had eight cells facing a corridor, with a dividing wall down the middle of the corridor to prevent communication between inmates on opposite sides. The brick cells measured 6 feet by 8 feet and were 9 feet high. Each had double reinforced iron doors and a very small iron-grated window, which was high on the exterior cell wall in order to prevent the inmate from looking down on the street. There was no bed or chair, only a mattress on the floor. Finally, each of the cells had a water tap and a privy pipe, and the stoves in the passageways provided some heat.

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