“The ‘Dead Branch’ in the History of the American Prison”: Jeffrey S. Adler on Ashley T. Rubin’s *The Deviant Prison*

Ashley T.  Rubin has written an unusual, fascinating book.  Historians typically focus on major trends, influential ideas, widely embraced intellectual currents, and popular movements.  By contrast, Deviant Prison explores a “dead branch” of history, the proverbial road not taken.  Rubin examines Eastern State Prison during the nineteenth century, an institution that proposed a radically innovative penal model that was quickly abandoned and rejected by policy makers and roundly discredited, derided, and denounced.

During the 1820s, American reformers launched two remarkably similar, competing models of a modern-style prison, institutions that promised to rehabilitate criminals and perfect society.  Both hinged on the idea that weak-willed individuals succumbed to the evils and temptations that infected daily life in the United States, particularly in cities, and then engaged in unlawful, violent, antisocial, licentious behavior.  By removing these transgressors from contaminated environments and their corrupting influences, such as demon rum, a totalizing institution could tap the law breakers’ innate powers of reason, encouraging deviant individuals to fortify their capacities for self-control.  Solitary confinement, therefore, would provide an opportunity for reflection that would thus enable them to become the instruments of own their rehabilitation.  The challenge would be to design such an institution.  Both systems focused on creating a setting that promoted reformative isolation.

After a series of disastrous experiments during the 1810s, the state of New York opened Auburn Prison in 1821, a bold, massive institution that confined criminals in nearly complete isolation until they reformed, learned self-discipline, and could be re-introduced into society.  Inmates occupied tiny, individual cells, wore striped uniforms, and refrained from speaking or communicating with each other.  Donning hoods to prevent nonverbal communication and contamination, they marched in lockstep to a factory-like workshop each day, where they toiled in complete silence and learned self-discipline.  Reformers dubbed this “congregate system,” because the otherwise isolated inmates worked in a shared setting, producing goods that partially offset the sizable cost of operating such an institution.  Pennsylvania officials launched a rival institution and reformative system eight years later, the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, promising a purer, more complete commitment to solitary confinement and its magical reformative qualities.  In the Pennsylvania system, small work areas attached to prisoners’ cells precluded any corrupting contact and ensured total isolation.  Commitment to resocializing individual inmates was so complete that authorities relied on inmate numbers, rather than names, during rare moments of interaction.

Reports of insanity and suicide, high rates of illness, cruelty, and all manner of mental and physical health problems dogged both institutions but were particularly pronounced at Eastern, with its more extreme regime of solitary confinement.  Only two other states, Rhode Island and New Jersey, adopted the Pennsylvania system.  In this formative era of prison development, other states established an Auburn-style penal institution.  Reformers, investigators, and visitors directed intense, brutal criticism at Eastern, and Rhode Island abandoned the Pennsylvania system within sex years and New Jersey followed suit after few decades later.  In short order, Eastern stood alone, the deviant prison, its model thoroughly discredited.

Yet, a small group of Eastern officials remained zealously committed to their failed experiment for nearly a century.  Even as they relaxed some of the institution’s most extreme practices, these prison authorities fiercely defended the Pennsylvania model as the “best, most humane system known to man” and insisted that critics were wrong, unfair, and misguided (p. 154).  Rubin seeks to explain their aggressive, defiant, unyielding investment in such a mocked, uniformly rejected prison model.

Deviant Prison is based on remarkable research.  Rubin mines every conceivable cache of sources and consults any and all relevant manuscript and published records.  Her study reconstructs the logic and operations of Eastern in unparalleled depth, detailing the private, internal discussions of prison authorities, their public statements, and their tenacious defense of a disgraced model of prison operation.  To explain their unwavering commitment to this failed experiment, Rubin makes fascinating use of organizational theory, particularly the work of Philip Selznick and his concept of “institutionalization.”  She adapts his theory to formulate the idea of “personal institutionalization,” wherein organizational leaders blur the boundaries between their own status and that of “their” institutions.

Rubin argues that the small group operating Eastern thoroughly invested and confused their own personal reputations and legacies with the fortunes of the prison and the survival of its distinctive vision.  They perceived criticism of Eastern and the Pennsylvania system as attacks on them and vice versa.  At stake was their “uniquely humane” solution for crime and disorder as well as their personal and professional status (p. 183).  In her analysis of this failed experiment, Ashley T. Rubin solves a vexing, minor mystery in the history of the prison and institutional reform in nineteenth-century America.