“Severe punishment for their misfortunes and poverty”: Philadelphia’s Arch Street Prison, 1804–37

Abstract

This article is a case study of the intersections between poverty, disease, and nineteenth-century criminal justice and penal policy, focusing on the Arch Street Prison, which operated in Philadelphia from the 1810s until the 1830s. In this prison, poor “strangers,” “wanderers,” and people experiencing homelessness were incarcerated for vagrancy, alongside debtors and untried prisoners. Philadelphia prison managers classified prisoners according to their socioeconomic class, which they viewed as linked to the crimes that these prisoners committed, distinguishing inmate populations across the carceral facilities in the city. During the 1832 cholera epidemic, approximately a third of the prison’s inmates died. Records documenting the epidemic reveal the experiences of Arch Street’s inmates, contemporaries’ perception of links between poverty, race, and disease, and the unique position of this prison in Philadelphia’s carceral history.