Auburn System Research Articles

The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829–1913 by Ashley T. Rubin

Reviewed by: The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829–1913 by Ashley T. Rubin Erica Rhodes Hayden (bio) The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America's Modern Penal System, 1829–1913. By Ashley T. Rubin. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 356. Cloth, $59.99.) In 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia opened as a premier institution of the Pennsylvania System, or separate system of punishment, [End Page 398] in which inmates silently inhabited separate cells. Other states used the Auburn System, or silent system, in which inmates worked in congregate and slept in separate cells. In The Deviant Prison, Ashley T. Rubin combines sociological theory and traditional historical research to delve into the inner workings of Eastern State to understand precisely why the prison clung to the Pennsylvania System of discipline. In doing so, Rubin argues that Eastern State was a "deviant prison" because the institution engaged in an "open and routine violation of increasingly solidified national norms about prison discipline" (xxxvii), making it both unique and criticized. Rubin contends that Eastern's use of and defense of the Pennsylvania System rested in the hands of the prison's administrators, who chose this path "because the system offered them something—the means to claim a unique status—that was not available under the Auburn System" (xlii). Rubin's argument about the importance of status to the prison's administrators centers on Philip Selznick's institutional theory, in which the people involved with an organization "develop their own sets of goals for themselves in relation to the organization and for the organization itself" (xlii), which often depart from the organization's original objectives. Rubin dubs this "personal institutionalization" and argues that it is why Eastern's administrators promoted the Pennsylvania System despite the consequences. It offered an "advantage of difference" (xlvi). Rubin carefully uses public annual reports of the institution and personal papers of the administrators, such as letters, warden logs, and administrators' journals, to prove how they defended the system, even manipulated it at times, in order to maintain the unique status for their institution and themselves. The Deviant Prison is exceptionally thorough in design and detail. The structure follows the rise and fall of the Pennsylvania System in three parts: establishing the conditions for Eastern's deviance and for the personal institutionalization of the administrators, exploring the advantage of being different through both public and private avenues, and examining the process of deinstitutionalization and the death of the Pennsylvania System. Chapters 1 and 2 provide solid historical context for the history and development of the two competing prison discipline systems. The author then dives deeply into the argument that the administration continued to promote a romanticized version of the Pennsylvania System, even if the daily practices departed from the stated goals. Rubin demonstrates cogently how Eastern's administrators held much power and autonomy to make decisions about how the prison was run, in part owing to lack of legal guidance, thus perpetuating the Pennsylvania System throughout the nineteenth century. During the reform fervor of the 1830s and 1840s, Rubin contends that Eastern became a deviant prison in two ways: as one [End Page 399] of the few to follow the Pennsylvania System, and because it was "heavily criticized" through a variety of "calumnious myths" that the administrators countered (101), consequently entrenching the Pennsylvania System further. Once the administration invested in the Pennsylvania System, there was little choice to backtrack. Part 2 explores a central portion of Rubin's overall argument through an analysis of the administrators' public and private defenses and manipulations of the system to keep it in place. For example, administrators used a variety of "naming trends" in annual reports to "protect the legitimacy of the Pennsylvania System" and to combat myths about solitary confinement (145). This, along with the fact that the administrators characterized their system as "humane, benevolent, mild, and kind," allowed them to "revel in their difference" (174). While recent historiographical trends on prisons and punishment have explored the inmate experience, particularly that of women, people of color, and juveniles, The Deviant Prison reverts to...

British prison projects: the Hard Labour Bill and the Penitentiary Act

The article analyzes the English prison projects: the Hard Labour Bill 1778 and the Penitentiary Act 1779. The author identified the reasons for their creation, sources, key points and their impact on the formation of penitentiary systems.
 The American Revolutionary War made it impossible relocation of convicted criminals to the colony. His Majesty's Government had to rush to find a replacement for transportation. In the mid-70s of 18 century there were attempts to develop the foundations of new types of punishment that would replace transportation. Such an alternative would hard labor in special Houses of Hard Labor and Penitentiary Houses. The application of punishment by hard labour to criminals sentenced to transportation is developed in the Hulks Act 1776, the Hard Labour Bill 1778 and the Penitentiary Act 1779. The Hard Labour Bill and the Penitentiary Act were not about reforming prisons, but about developing a system of execution and serving a new type of punishment – imprisonment combined with hard labor.
 The Hard Labor Bill for the first time enshrined the norms that, in 30-40 years, became the basis of the Pennsylvania system, the Auburn system, the progressive system: solitary confinement, the division of convicts into classes, the correction of the offender with the active participation of chaplain, the system disciplinary offence and sanction, initiation of post-penitentiary care, requirements for prison staff, control and supervision of prison activity by the public and judges.
 The Hard Labor Bill has not been approved by Parliament. It has been slightly redesigned. The idea of a system of Houses of Hard Labor across the country had to be abandoned. Instead, William Blackstone proposed experimental Penitentiary Houses. It was approved in the Penitentiary Act 1779. An analysis of the main provisions of the Penitentiary Act shows that at least part of the regulation of the Penitentiary Houses and their conditions of detention were based on the Hard Labor Bill. Although the ambitious idea of creating a network of prisons throughout the country has been abandoned, Penitentiary Act 1779 has retained the general philosophy of imprisonment in combination with hard labor. Despite the lack of practical implementation, the 1779 Penitentiary Act was essential to further improve the operation of existing detention facilities and build new prisons throughout the country, but as a local initiative rather than a centralized reform.

Penology at source: Francis Lieber

The first half of the 19th century was the time of the American penitentiary solutions rising. New look at the penalty of imprisonment caused that from the end of the 18th century, so right after the first modern American separate system prison was built in Wallnut (1790) travels of representatives of European countries visiting new US penitentiary establishments have been widely spreaded. Theoretical travels in search of the best prison solutions. Reports from the prison reformers were produced, and the discussions around them were accompanied by the development of a modern scientific discourse on prison and the penitentiary system that was being created at that time. The first wave of these trips took place at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, document it in particular, the reports of the French F. A. F. La Raochefoucauld-Liancourt (1796), Englishman J. Turnbull (1797), Pole J.U. Niemcewicz (1807) . The intensification of these journeys took place after 1830, when the second type of separate system (the Auburn system) developed in America. During this time, reports of visits to American prisons were published, among others, by leading reformers of the prison, particularly considered to be the creator of the German prison science N.H. Julius (1833), or W. Crawford from England .

Systemy penitencjarne na przestrzeni XVIII i XIX wieku

The aim of the article is to present the penitentiary systems which functioned in XVIII and XIX centuries. At the beginning the author makes an attempt to define the very concept of a penitentiary system and points to the existing inconsistent classification of penitentiary systems. The next part of the article is devoted to the characterisation of individual systems. The first one to be discussed is the oldest system of shared incarceration. Then the cell system is discussed with its two variants: the Pennsylvania and the Auburn system. Next the progressive system is presented, including its English and Irish variants. As the last one the system of American reformatories is discussed. The characterisation of all the systems included their ideological grounds, their execution in practice as well as the reasons why some of them turned out to be totally erroneous.

The Swedish Prison System in Historical Perspective: a Story of Successful Failure?

This article discusses the emergence of the prison system in Sweden during the nineteenth century against the background of the broader context of prison history. Although the number of prisoners had quadrupled already in the first half of the century, it was in the second half that the system was developed. As in many other nations, a heated debate took place on the question of which of the opposing systems – the Philadelphia or the Auburn system – should be chosen. In Sweden this battle between the systems ended with an almost total victory for a Philadelphia‐like system, i.e., on the principle of solitary confinement. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a system built on solitary confinement expanded at the same time as the penal policy took on a more disciplinary character, a tendency that became especially evident at the turn of the century. This expansion continued even after many other nations more or less abandoned solitary confinement. This article argues that this expansion was the result of several factors, the most important being the unprecedented disciplinary possibilities of solitary confinement. The article also argues that this development created a form of ‘successful’ institutions, i.e., well administered, secure and calm institutions, which became one important reason for the remarkably high degree of legitimacy that the Swedish prisons have enjoyed during the twentieth century.

Opposing Outcomes of the Industrial Prison: Japan and the United States Compared

The industrial prison first emerged in the early 1820s as the Auburn system in New York State, combining the characteristics of the machine-based factory and the custodial prison. Unprecedented demands were placed on the skills and dedication of both prison staff and inmates. Political opposition gradually deprived the industrial prison of its early prominent place in American penology. In Japan, the model appeared later and today continues to flourish with easy access to the open market. Whereas the industrial prison and the contracting of prison labor suffered political attack in the United States, they are tolerated in Japan. Japanese prison personnel benefit from sound recruitment and a long history of in-service training. The American public debated whether priority was to be given to the rehabilitation of criminals or to the concept of the industrial prison, but in Japan, where the policy of diversion greatly reduces the proportion of offenders who end up in prison, and those who are imprisoned have been selected asbeing especially "unworthy," the industrial prison is seen as an appropriate means of managing such offenders.

From Amsterdam to Auburn: An Explanation for the Rise of the Prison in Seventeenth-Century Holland and Nineteenth-Century America

textabstractThe article attempts to make the difference in timing between Europe and the United States with respect to the rise of imprisonment understandable. It starts with Europe, taking Amsterdam as its main example. As a punitive institution, the prison became well-established in various European countries during the seventeenth century. The penal prison, holding mainly condemned criminals, emerged in the eighteenth century. These developments are a function of ongoing processes of state formation. The article next establishes that no true prisons existed in Colonial America. On that Continent, the take-off of imprisonment came after 1800, notably, as David Rothman argued, in the 1820s and 1830s and only in the North. This is understandable, since by then North-East America had reached a stage of monopolization of violence comparable to that in seventeenth-century Europe. Finally, it is argued that the well-known divergence of preferences in the nineteenth century, with Europe opting in majority for the Philadelphia system and American states for the Auburn system, can be explained with reference to the early modern situation: the Auburn system essentially resembled that of the early modern prison-workhouse with forced labor, whereas Europeans wanted to experiment with a new regime of mind control which they found in the Philadelphia system. Suggested further reading: Pieter Spierenburg, The prison experience. Disciplinary institutions and their inmates in early modern Europe. New Brunswick, NJ (Rutgers UP) 1991 (reprinted by Amsterdam University Press, 2007).

The Development of Parole in the United States

T HE United States, in most lines a leader in penal reform, was slow to take up the idea of parole. This was doubtless due to the fact that there was not the same pressing necessity for it here as in the old country. Ticketsof-leave had originated in a very new country where there was a great demand for labor of every sort. England had taken it up when she was faced with the thousands of convicts for whom there were no prisons. The United States did not try it until a group of strong believers in the reformability of the youthful convict had the opportunity of putting their ideas into practice in that experiment, new itself, the reformatory. In spite of the atrocious conditions that still exist and would seem to point to the contrary, the United States has always been foremost in its interest in penal reform, if not in criminological theory. Among the earliest reformers was William Penn, who had himself been a prisoner for a time in England. His contribution lay in cutting down the number of capital crimes to one, wilful murder, a reform that was much more startling in that day than we can realize now. His Quaker followers continued to be interested in penal reform, and their efforts resulted in two distinctive contributions-the voluntary association for the relief of prisoners, somewhat like the English associations for the same purpose, and the Pennsylvania system of prison discipline. Although misguided, the Pennsylvania system was a genuine attempt at the reformation of the criminal, the means used being separate confinement. A few years later, in I797, another system was devised in New York which came to be known as the Auburn system and whose fundamental principle was reformation through congregate work in silence in the daytime and separation at night. Between the two systems a fierce rivalry sprang up and extended even to Europe. As a means of reforming the criminal both systems were marked failures. The Pennsylvania system, when carried out as it was planned, resulted, at worst, in insanity, and, at best, in habits that ill adapted the prisoner for life in society. The Auburn system fell a prey to the contract laborer or, when that evil was avoided, failed to provide work and education that were really reformative. But both systems survived for a long time in many parts of the country and are far from being extinct today. It was not until I879 that any real advance was made in the United States. A group of men, E. C. Wines, Z. R. Brockway, Gaylord Hubbell, and others were interested in the progress that was being made in Ireland under the mark system, an importation, as we have said above, from Australia. In I867 Wines and Dwight made a report to the legislature