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5 - Neutralizing the Calumnious Myths: Administrators’ Public Defense of the Pennsylvania System

from Part II - THE ADVANTAGE OF DIFFERENCE: The Process of Institutionalization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2021

Ashley T. Rubin
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa
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Summary

When Eastern opened in 1829 and became the first prison to implement fully the Pennsylvania System, it theoretically could have offered a competitor model to the Auburn System. Instead, soon after it opened, commentators revived earlier criticisms of solitary confinement and took aim at Eastern and its supporters, especially its administrators. During the 1830s and 1840s, Eastern became a deviant prison—both as one of the few American prisons to follow the Pennsylvania System as well as a heavily criticized prison. This chapter traces that process. It introduces the origins and propagators of the most frequent calumnious myths about the Pennsylvania System and their influence on other states and prisons' decisions to avoid or abandon the Pennsylvania System. Finally, it discusses the impact of deviance on Eastern's administrators, who were just as criticized as the system they implemented. This criticism became was in the process by which the Pennsylvania System became personally institutionalized at Eastern.

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The Deviant Prison
Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829–1913
, pp. 135 - 170
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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