Discuss in detail the history and significance of the Walnut Street Jail.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The Walnut Street Jail was originally constructed in 1773 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and operated as a typical local jail of the time: holding pretrial detainees and minor offenders; failing to separate by gender, age, or offense; using the fee system, which penalized the poor and led to the near starvation of some; and offering better accommodations and even access to liquor and sex to those who could pay for it (Zupan, 1991). It was remodeled, however, in 1790 and reconceptualized so that many correctional scholars, though not all, regard it as the “first” prison. The remodeled cellhouse was of a frame construction and was built for the inmates of the “prison” section of the jail, with separate cells for each inmate. Based on the reforms that John Howard (and later Bentham and Fry) had envisioned for English and European jails, several reforms were instituted in this prison: The fee system was dropped, inmates were adequately clothed and fed regardless of their ability to pay, and they were separated by gender and offense. Children were not incarcerated in the prison, and debtors were separated from convicted felons. Though inmates were to live in isolated cells (to avoid “contaminating” each other), some work requirements brought them together. In addition, medical care was provided and attendance at religious services was required. The availability of alcohol and access to members of the opposite sex and prostitutes was stopped. The impetus for this philosophical change came from the reform efforts of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (or the Philadelphia Prison Society, currently known as the Pennsylvania Prison Society), led by Dr. Benjamin Rush who was a physician, reformer, statesman, and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Rush agitated for laws to improve the jail’s conditions of confinement and a different belief about correctional institutions—namely, that they could be used to reform their inmates (Nagel, 1973; Roberts, 1997). Ideally, the Walnut Street Jail (prison) was to operate based on the religious beliefs of the Quakers and their emphasis on the reflective study of the Bible and an abhorrence for violence, which was so prevalent in other correctional entities. In 1789, the General Assembly of Pennsylvania enacted legislation based on these recommendations and the Pennsylvania system was born (Nagel, 1973). The Walnut Street Jail, as a prison, was also an entity with a philosophy of penitence, which, it was hoped, would lead to reform and redemption. This philosophy was combined with an architectural arrangement shaped to facilitate it by ensuring that inmates were mostly in solitary cells. As Roberts (1997) aptly notes, the reason the Walnut Street Jail’s new wing was the first real prison, as opposed to the other prisons such as Newgate of Connecticut that preceded it or some of the early European prisons, was “[b]ecause it carried out incarceration as punishment, implemented a rudimentary classification system, featured individual cells, and was intended to provide a place for offenders to do penance—hence the term ‘penitentiary’” (p. 26). But in reality, the Walnut Street Jail soon became crowded, reportedly housing 4 times its capacity. As Johnston (2010) notes, “At one point 30 to 40 inmates were sleeping on blankets on the floor of rooms [which were] 18 feet square” (p. 13). Moreover, the institutional industry buildings that provided work for inmates burned down, leading to idleness, and the Walnut Street Jail (prison) by 1816 was little different from what it had been before the reforms (Harris, 1973; Zupan, 1991).