Eastern State Penitentiary: The Quakers Who Invented Solitary Confinement and the Silence That Broke Men
In the middle of Philadelphia, surrounded by rowhouses and coffee shops and people walking their dogs, there is a fortress. Thirty-foot walls, battlements, arrow slits — a full medieval castle, built in 1829, in a country that had never had a castle and had just finished throwing off the kind of people who built them. Inside the walls there is no keep. There is a hub, and radiating out from it, like the spokes of a wheel, eleven long stone corridors lined with cells. Walk down one of them today and the roof is mostly gone; there are trees growing out of the cellblocks and the light comes down in shafts through the collapsed vaulting, and it is one of the most beautiful ruins in America, and every square inch of it was designed with love, by good people, to do something unspeakable. Eastern State Penitentiary is where solitary confinement was invented. Not discovered, not stumbled into — invented , deliberately, as a reform, by Quakers, out of tenderness. The Gentlest Idea Anyone Ev...