From the very beginning, Eastern’s administrators’ autonomy was challenged directly by occasional incursions from the local penal reformers and indirectly by the state legislature's lackluster patronage. These challenges became more invasive in the 1850s, peaking in the 1860s. In response, Eastern's administrators sought to establish jurisdiction over their prison by proclaiming their own special expertise and insisting on deference in matters affecting Eastern. By the 1870s, however, penal actors on the national stage were likewise proclaiming their own expertise and professional status, while Eastern's administrators felt increasingly irrelevant. In response to these national-level developments, the administrators further developed their claims to professional status. In this context, the administrators' claims to professional status provided them a more promising path to self-aggrandizement than continuing to proclaim the Pennsylvania System's superiority. Consequently, the administrators shifted their focus from the Pennsylvania System to their status as professional penologists. It was this shift from defense to professionalization that deinstitutionalized the Pennsylvania System.

This chapter describes the Pennsylvania System’s rapid decline at Eastern in the 1860s and 1870s. Catastrophic levels of post-war overcrowding caused the Pennsylvania System's most central components to break down in ways that the administrators fought hard to prevent or stop. However, the administrators’ verbal commitment to the Pennsylvania System ultimately outlasted its physical presence at Eastern. By the mid-1870s, something changed in the administrators' commitment: increasingly, the administrators abandoned their attempt to save the Pennsylvania System and instead redefined it into something else. This shift occurred after external criticism of the Pennsylvania System had abated. Thus, when Eastern's administrators finally abandoned the Pennsylvania System, they were not acceding to public pressure that they had withstood for nearly five decades. Instead, waning criticism had removed the administrators' opportunity to defend the Pennsylvania System and tout their own excellence, thereby allowing the Pennsylvania System to deinstitutionalize for Eastern's administrators.