Pennsylvania System
Definition
Also called the separate system, a regime of total individual isolation day and night, with solitary labour, refined at Eastern State Penitentiary from 1829.
Related terms
- Auburn System
- Also called the silent system, a regime combining solitary night cells with daytime congregate labour under an absolute rule against speech, developed...
- Congregate Labour
- Work performed by prisoners together in shared workshops during the day, the defining feature of the Auburn system, as opposed to solitary...
- Indeterminate Sentence
- A prison term without a fixed release date, set instead by a range that a parole authority narrows based on the prisoner's...
- Panopticon
- Jeremy Bentham's 1791 design for an institution built around a central observation tower, letting a single supervisor watch many inmates who cannot...
- Penitentiary
- An institution built on the idea that isolation, labour and religious instruction could produce genuine penitence and reform an offender's character, rather...