Journal of the Early Republic

With The Deviant Prison, Ashley T. Rubin reminds historians to look to the outliers, the "dead branches of history," and the roads not taken. She contends that Eastern State Penitentiary, perhaps the most famous anomaly in American carceral history for its retention of the Pennsylvania System of prison discipline, is more than just a failed rival to the Auburn System. Eastern State's battle to preserve solitary confinement with moral instruction proved futile; the Auburn System of prison discipline, with congregate labor during the day and separation of prisoners in individual cells at night, famously dominated the early carceral landscape in the United States. But Rubin believes that Eastern State holds a generalizable lesson about the development of penal institutions in the early republic. She argues that prison administrators' concern for their own professional status often dictated the evolution of the carceral institutions in their charge. Amidst the crush of literature attributing key changes and developments in American corrections to forces outside prison walls—particularly socioeconomic and political ones—Rubin cautions historians not to lose sight of the administrative change-makers within.

Rubin begins with a question familiar to scholars of punishment: Why did Eastern State cling to the widely reviled Pennsylvania System long after every other penal institution in America had publicly rejected it in favor of the Auburn system? Other chroniclers of the early debates between adopters of the Auburn, or "congregate" system, and the Pennsylvania, or "separate" system, have spilled much ink attempting to explain Eastern State's reluctance to follow national trends in prison discipline, tying this institutional stubbornness to factors that originated beyond Eastern's imposing stone walls. Rubin contends, however, that the standard explanations of Eastern State's retention of the Pennsylvania system are too simplistic. Instead, she draws on the work of organizational theorists to look inside Eastern for answers, offering a novel, roughly chronological account of how Eastern State Penitentiary became a "deviant prison."

By the Civil War, every state in the Union had adopted some version of the Auburn System of prison discipline. Under this congregate system, incarcerated persons clad in striped uniforms labored daily in makeshift [End Page 656] factories in total silence before returning to solitary cells at night. Advocates claimed that prisoners would escape the ill influence of their fellow inmates, be reformed through hard labor, and turn a profit for the institution that housed them. Eastern State alone retained the Pennsylvania System, in which prisoners lived and worked on their own in large cells, kept totally separate from their fellow inmates. Incarcerated men and women at Eastern could speak with the prison's administrators and staff, as well as with official visitors, including clergymen and reformers whose presence might help facilitate their rehabilitation. In theory, Eastern inmates were also totally anonymous, so that one day they could transition back to their lives outside free of any stigma.

In Eastern's early years, the Pennsylvania System could have been a viable alternative to the congregate system, but prison reformers outside of Philadelphia quickly recycled earlier arguments against solitary confinement after Eastern admitted its first prisoners. The well-publicized horrors of experimentation with solitary in the 1820s gave them ammunition. From the 1830s to the 1840s, Auburn System loyalists spread and reinforced what Rubin calls "calumnious myths" about the Pennsylvania System and Eastern's administrators. Many of these stories about the Pennsylvania System—that it was expensive, unprofitable, and cruel—were cited in policy decisions as officials set up new prisons outside of the Northeast region. But the constant smear campaign waged against the separate system motivated administrators to ensure the system's survival at Eastern, because they reaped personal rewards from their sustained, public defense of their embattled institution. Rubin...