COLUMN: Forms of Punishment

From Max Page's "Office Hours," Fall '95 From Max Page's "Office Hours," Fall '95What's a columnist to do? The verdict in the biggest court case of the millennium (hyperbole seems to be the rage these days, so I think I'll indulge) was handed down and the commentators descended like vultures on the final scraps after a year-long meal. The case has now been tugged this way and that like salt water taffy, hashed and rehashed, spun and shaken, unpacked, repacked, overpacked. Can anyone say anything more? As a country, we have always tried to solve our problems with architecture. From the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (which laid out the West's "democratic grid") to designs for Washington, D.C., from Greek Revival homes to mental institutions and prisons, from the Victorian home to City Beautiful parkways, American architecture has been the product of the pursuit of various American missions through the careful organization of space for public and private life. Long after the ideals that animated the waves of reform efforts which swept the country every few decades have fallen from favor, American cities remain littered with the physical remains of efforts to literally build reforming ideals in brick, stone and steel. One of the most impressive of these "build ideas" is just a mile away from Penn's campus. The Eastern State Penitentiary, just north of the art museum, was the single most influential and controversial prison structure in the United States in the 19th century. Eastern State Penitentiary, built in 1829, which pioneered what became known as the "Pennsylvania Plan," the building's form -- a revolutionary design utilizing central "panopticon" rotunda with radiating spokes of individual prison cells --was a literal, physical embodiment of an attitude toward the nature of crime and human behavior. The designers of Eastern State believed that if prisoners were placed in solitary confinement and forced to confront their crime alone, sought Christian forgiveness and learned new, more productive ways of conducting themselves they might be successfully reintroduced into society. John Haviland, whose numerous public buildings in Philadelphia and beyond, especially the "Tombs" prison in New York City, had brought him great renown, created an imposing, Gothic structure with thirty-foot walls and a massive guard tower. Even as the tower at the center of the radial plan symbolized the watchful eye of the state, the dark entrance building to the prison spoke to citizens on the outside. At Eastern State Penitentiary, reform became almost completely an architectural problem. Many, however, were suspicious of Eastern State's solution: They saw complete solitary confinement and constant observation as dehumanizing. Even as the first prisoners moved into Eastern State in 1836, there were calls for abandoning the solitary system which appeared to inspire fury and insanity, and not peace and "penitence." Charles Dickens (just one of the many famous visitors to Eastern State, which was one of the country's most popular tourist destinations), on his travels through the United States in 1842, called the system utilized at Eastern State Penitentiary "cruel and wrong." The "Auburn Plan," named after the Auburn, N.Y. prison structure built in 1820 and perfected in the Charles Street Prison in Boston, rejected the notion of strict solitary confinement. Instead, the Auburn Plan emphasized silence during days spent working with other inmates, and solitary confinement at night. But if the agony of Eastern State was to be in the utter lack of human interaction (never fully adhered to, as our historical photographs show), the Auburn Plan prisons' lay in the rigid discipline and corporal punishment employed to break the spirit of hardened criminals. Armed with faulty and often unusually cruel notions for reforming prisoners, these early 19th century prisons stand as a lesson in how social reform often takes a harsh turn. Eastern State remains important today because it holds within it a generation's struggle to devise forms for coping with one of society's most difficult problems: How to punish and reform those who transgress the rules of society. Despite the prison's often inglorious history, we may be living in a time of a potentially more dangerous and divisive trend: a permanent, and physical, disengagement on the part of society's powerful from social reform in the city. Whatever the horrors we may see in Eastern State's past, the ideology under which it was built was animated by a desire to return criminals to society as productive citizens. The fact that we no longer speak of "rehabilitation" or even the antiquated word "penitence," when speaking of prisons suggests our rejection of reform as the governing idea behind our prison system. Instead, that fiery but ultimately unsatisfying and destructive emotion of revenge galvanizes our efforts. Even as we build more prisons to make an anxious citizenry safer, the elites of our society have fled further from the public, into the false utopianism of gated communities, of "fortress" homes and office buildings. The new urban landscape is a landscape of amnesia: It is built on the notion that we can ignore social divisions and inequities whose roots stretch back into our history. Ultimately, we may be forgetting the notion that architecture can and should be used for social good. In a time of government retrenchment from virtually all investments, prisons remain the single major public building program in the nation, supported by willing taxpayer money. France, under Francois Mitterand, has undertaken a building project the equivalent of Baron Haussman's remaking of Paris in the 19th century, creating a vast new national library, the Bastille Opera House and a redesigned Louvre. In the United States, we choose instead to build prisons. They threaten to be the monuments of our age. Although Eastern State is no longer a functioning prison, its future seems bright. A recent art show, entitled "Prison Sentences," and a the filming of a Terry Gilliam film, as well as regular tours suggest that Eastern State may be adapted to new uses. Eastern State, on Fairmount Avenue, may be visited on weekends, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., but only for the next three weekends. It will reopen for tours in the spring.