Thomas Edison at Auburn Prison

"A Living Tomb"

Pennsylvania’s Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, from a nineteenth-century lithograph. This world-famous centerpiece of the American prison system was designed by the architect John Haviland and opened its doors in 1829. It's now a "preserved ruin."

Inspired by the doctrines of Quaker reformers and of Enlightenment idealists such as Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin, Eastern State Penitentiary was intended to rehabilitate convicts through a discipline of solitary confinement, labor, and moral instruction. This experimental prison, according to the reformer Roberts Vaux, sought “to furnish the criminal with every opportunity which christian duty enjoins, for promoting his restoration to the path of virtue, because seclusion is believed to be an essential ingredient in moral treatment.”

To some who entered its cells, though, solitary confinement at Eastern State seemed to be a terrifying fate. Charles Dickens described the inmates as men and women buried alive:

“Over the head and face of every prisoner who comes into this melancholy house a black hood is drawn; and in this dark shroud, an emblem of the curtain dropped between him and the living world, he is led to the cell from which he never again comes forth until his whole term of imprisonment has expired. He never hears of wife or children; home or friends; the life or death of any single creature. He sees the prison officers, but, with that exception, he never looks upon a human countenance, or hears a human voice. He is a man buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair.”

One of the inmates Dickens encountered at Eastern State was a poet who used the pen-name Harry Hawser. In a poem called “The Captive,” he also described imprisonment as a kind of living death:

Fated to a living tomb,
For years on years in woe to brood
Upon the past, the Captive’s doom
Is galling chains and solitude.

"In the condition of a Slave"

In a document from 1823, the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts State Prison, one of the monuments of the reform movement that built the early American penitentiary system, described the new inmate's descent into "disgrace":

"When a convict is received…he is stripped of his clothing, and dressed in the livery of disgrace; his hair is cut, and he is put, for a period of time, into a cell, where no sun ever shines. He is cut off from intercourse with society. He lives for twenty-four hours on eight ounces of coarse bread, with enough water to allay the fever which runs through his veins. He is removed into the workshops, and pursues a constant and laborious occupation for others’ benefit, in the condition of a Slave."

The Prison Farm

Prisoners working in the fields of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, or Parchman Farm, from a 1935 photograph.

Opened in the early 1900s, Mississippi's Parchman Farm was one of several Southern prisons whose inmates worked under conditions that many compared to antebellum slavery. "There is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi," wrote William Faulkner in "The Old Man" (1939); "it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trustees."

In 1947 and 1948, the folk music archivist Alan Lomax recorded a set of haunting work songs in Parchman. Lomax called this music "the finest, wildest, and most complex folk singing in the South."

On the origins and history of Parchman Farm, see David M. Oshinsky's Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.

The Tombs

Façade of Manhattan’s Halls of Justice, known as The Tombs. From Charles Sutton, The New York Tombs: Its Secrets and Its Mysteries, eds. James B. Mix and Samuel A. MacKeever (New York: United States Publishing Company, 1874), p. 78.

The English novelist Charles Dickens, who visited the prison in the early 1840s, described its architecture as a “dismal-fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter’s palace in a melodrama."

The Tombs is also the prison where Bartleby, the ghostly, enigmatic hero of Herman Melville's short story, spends his last days. Melville's narrator discovers his lifeless body in a courtyard there:

"The yard was entirely quiet. It was not accessible to the common prisoners. The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids, it seemed, wherein, by some strange magic, through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung.

"Strangely huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones, I saw the wasted Bartleby. But nothing stirred. I paused, then went close up to him; stooped over, and saw that his dim eyes were open; otherwise he seemed profoundly sleeping."

A Prisoner Working

"Interior View of a Cell" (detail). From Richard Vaux, Brief Sketch of the Origin and History of the State Penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, at Philadelphia (Philadelphia: McLaughlin Brothers, 1872).

An unnamed prisoner working in his solitary cell at Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia. "It would be impossible to live here without labor," said one inmate in the 1830s.

On the economics and discipline of labor in nineteenth-century penitentiaries, see Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory, and Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain.

The Cat-O'-Nine-Tails

From Charles Sutton, The New York Tombs: Its Secrets and Its Mysteries, eds. James B. Mix and Samuel A. MacKeever (New York: United States Publishing Company, 1874), p. 591.

The lash in use at New York's Auburn Prison in the nineteenth century. "I consider it impossible," said the notorious warden Elam Lynds, "to govern a large prison without a whip."