from Part III - Forced to Adapt: The Conditions for and Process of Deinstitutionalization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2021
Eastern's administrators’ dedication to the Pennsylvania System and the status it provided competed with baser instincts, like inter-personal animosities and financial self-interest. This chapter highlights several extreme cases in which some of the most apparently committed devotees of the Pennsylvania System jeopardized the prison's operations because of their own pettiness. Such extreme behavior was tolerated by the other administrators who rarely intervened until circumstances became dire—such as when the administrators' private bad actions ran the risk of public embarrassment and thereby jeopardized their collective reputation. This chapter reconciles the administrators' Janus-face character by arguing that one thing mattered to Eastern's administrators even more than maintaining the Pennsylvania System: maintaining their own reputations. For men whose reputation as benevolent, humanitarian gentlemen was integral to their self-image, acknowledging their own or their colleagues' occasional bad acts would be extremely damaging. Both the men who behaved badly and the men who enabled them had to ignore these behaviors or shatter the facade they had constructed and maintained.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.