This chapter examines two strategies Eastern's administrators used in their annual reports to challenge one of the most effective—and personally detrimental—myths: the Pennsylvania System’s cruelty and inhumanity. To undermine this myth, Eastern's administrators used several techniques of neutralization, characterizing the Pennsylvania System and themselves as a kind, benevolent, and humane, while arguing that the Auburn System’s supporters were the opposite—profit mongers willing to resort to cruel practices. These techniques allowed the administrators to defend themselves against charges that they were engaging in cruel and inhumane behavior. Because of their defensive posture the administrators could sublimate their own self-praise into the prison’s defense. Thus, administrators' statements defending the Pennsylvania System were often as much about the administrators themselves as the system they sought to defend. Indeed, the ability to constantly issue these statements incentivized Eastern's administrators to maintain the Pennsylvania System for as long as they did. These claims were the largest anchor keeping the Pennsylvania System personally institutionalized.

The annual reports represent the principal medium through which the administrators presented and defended their embattled prison against claims that the Pennsylvania System was expensive, cruel and inhumane, ineffective, and impracticable. These claims defended both the Pennsylvania System and the men who implemented it. In challenging the myths’ veracity, Eastern's administrators relied on what criminologists Gresham Sykes and David Matza call “techniques of neutralization,” a series of accounts of their behavior that challenge the fact of, or mitigate responsibility or blame for, immoral or inappropriate behavior. This chapter explores three such strategies: changing how they described the Pennsylvania System, denying the existence of bad outcomes, and denying the system's responsibility for bad outcomes that did occur by placing the blame on others. Ultimately, these techniques of neutralization enabled Eastern's administrators to neutralize the pains of deviance and sustain the Pennsylvania System despite the criticism. Defending against the myths in this way also created a context for the Pennsylvania System to become personally institutionalized for Eastern's administrators.