The Pennsylvania and Auburn Systems of Prison Discipline

Through most of the eighteenth century, European and colonial American courts punished serious crime on the body: whipping, branding, the pillory, transportation, and death by hanging for a long list of offences. Jails existed, but mainly to hold the accused before trial or debtors until they paid, not to punish through confinement itself.

That began to change after the American Revolution, when Quaker reformers in Philadelphia, working through the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons founded in 1787, argued that punishment should aim at moral reform rather than physical suffering or public spectacle.

Their first experiment came at the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, converted in 1790 to include a wing of solitary cells for the most serious offenders. The idea was straightforward: a person removed from corrupting company, given useful work and encouraged toward religious reflection, would come to feel genuine penitence, hence the word penitentiary.

The Walnut Street experiment was crude by later standards, overcrowded almost immediately, but it established the principle that a purpose-built institution, not a courtyard punishment, was the right instrument of criminal justice.

This shift did not happen in isolation. Cesare Beccaria's 1764 essay on crimes and punishments had already argued that punishment should be proportionate, certain and directed at deterring future crime rather than settling a moral account through cruelty, an argument that fed directly into penal reform on both sides of the Atlantic.

Jeremy Bentham built on the same utilitarian logic in England, and reformers in Pennsylvania and New York each tried to design an institution that would make Beccaria's proportionality and certainty concrete in daily prison routine.

By the 1820s two state governments had built full-scale penitentiaries meant to replace the improvised Walnut Street model: Pennsylvania at what became Eastern State Penitentiary, and New York at Auburn. Both were funded and built as showcase institutions, visited by foreign observers and copied abroad, and both claimed to have solved the reform problem. They arrived at nearly opposite answers.

Eastern State Penitentiary opened outside Philadelphia in 1829, designed by architect John Haviland with seven cellblocks radiating from a central hub. Each prisoner entered hooded so he could not learn the building's layout or recognise other inmates, and lived alone in a private cell with an attached exercise yard, never seeing another prisoner's face for the length of a sentence that could run for years.

Meals, work materials such as shoemaking or weaving, and a single approved book, usually a Bible, were passed through a slot in the cell door.

The reasoning behind this extreme isolation was that a prisoner left alone with only his conscience and religious reading would confront his crime honestly, without the posturing or corrupting influence that group confinement invited. Solitary labour was meant to keep the mind occupied and teach a marketable skill for release, while total silence between prisoners was treated as inseparable from total physical separation.

Supporters, including the French visitors Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, who toured American prisons beginning in 1831 and published a report on the penitentiary system in 1833, argued that the separate system produced calmer, less hardened prisoners than any congregate alternative.

In practice the system proved expensive and difficult to sustain. Individual cells with private exercise yards demanded far more building space per prisoner than a congregate dormitory or workshop, and total isolation ruled out efficient production line labour, cutting off the income prisons could otherwise earn by leasing convict work to contractors. Reports of prisoners suffering hallucinations, breakdowns and suicidal despair accumulated steadily, and by the 1860s Pennsylvania itself had begun relaxing the strict separation it had pioneered.

Charles Dickens visited Eastern State in 1842 and wrote in American Notes that he considered the isolation crueller than physical torture precisely because it left no visible mark, a judgment that became one of the most quoted critiques of the separate system. The building itself survived far longer than the regime; it operated as a working prison until 1971 and today stands as a preserved historic site in Philadelphia.

Auburn Prison in New York opened in 1817 and initially tried a version of total isolation similar to Pennsylvania's later approach, but idleness and rising mental illness among prisoners kept in solitary cells without work pushed administrators toward a different design.

Under agent and keeper Elam Lynds, who ran the prison from 1821 to 1825, Auburn adopted the plan that would carry its name: prisoners slept alone in small individual cells at night but were marched in lockstep each morning to shared workshops, where they laboured side by side making goods such as shoes, barrels and textiles for sale under contract to outside businesses.

The defining rule was silence. Prisoners could not speak to one another under any circumstances, in the workshop, the mess hall or the exercise yard, enforced through corporal punishment for violations, including flogging under Lynds's regime.

The intent, articulated by Lynds and his deputy John D. Cray, was to strip prisoners of the group identity and mutual encouragement that congregate confinement would otherwise allow, achieving something close to the isolation of the separate system without its cost, since men worked in shared, productive spaces instead of alone.

Auburn's economics proved decisive in the rivalry with Pennsylvania. Congregate workshops could be built more cheaply than blocks of large private cells with attached yards, and contract labour generated revenue that partly offset running costs, an argument that mattered enormously to state legislatures footing the bill.

Sing Sing Prison, built by convict labour under Lynds starting in 1825 using the same congregate plan, extended the model, and by the 1830s most new American state prisons, including in Connecticut, Ohio and Massachusetts, followed Auburn rather than Pennsylvania.

Critics of the Auburn system pointed to the same underlying problem as its rival: enforcing constant silence among crowded, working men required harsh and frequent corporal discipline, producing a regime that looked less like moral reform and more like industrial control backed by the whip.

Even so, the Auburn plan's lower building and running cost made it the dominant American prison architecture through the nineteenth century, and it remains the ancestor of the telephone-pole cellblock design used in many prisons today.

English philosopher Jeremy Bentham published his design for the panopticon in a series of letters in 1791, proposing a circular building with prisoner cells arranged around the inner wall and a central inspection tower from which a single guard could look into any cell without the prisoners being able to tell whether they were being watched at a given moment.

Bentham's argument was economic and psychological at once: since prisoners could never be certain of the guard's attention, they would behave as though watched continuously, reducing the number of staff needed to enforce order.

No prison was ever built exactly to Bentham's specifications, but the underlying principle of centralised, unverifiable surveillance shaped prison architecture well beyond his own design. Both Eastern State's radiating wings and Auburn's later cellblock layouts positioned a small number of supervisory posts to command long rows of cells, applying the panopticon's economy of watching even where the building was not circular.

The clearest export of the principle was Pentonville Prison in London, completed in 1842 to a design by military engineer Joshua Jebb, with five wings radiating from a central hall so that a limited staff could observe every corridor.

Pentonville ran on a version of the separate system and became the template for over fifty prisons built across England between 1842 and 1848, showing how the surveillance logic of Bentham's panopticon and the moral logic of Pennsylvania's separate system could be combined in one building.

The same radial, watch-centred logic travelled to British colonial territory. The Cellular Jail built in Port Blair in the Andaman Islands between 1896 and 1906 used seven wings extending from a central watchtower, explicitly following the separate system to isolate political prisoners from one another, with the tower positioned so a single guard could survey the approach to every wing at once. The building demonstrates how a design worked out for moral reform in Philadelphia and London was repurposed by a colonial government for political control.

Contemporary observers framed the choice as a trade-off between two harms rather than a clean victory for either side. Tocqueville and Beaumont's 1833 report on the American penitentiary system, produced after their 1831 tour, favoured the moral seriousness of Pennsylvania's isolation while acknowledging its expense; American state legislatures, more sensitive to running costs and the revenue a congregate workshop could generate, tilted decisively toward Auburn.

By the time reform-minded penologists gathered for the first National Prison Congress in Cincinnati in 1870, the debate over which system reformed character better had largely given way to a newer question about whether either fixed-sentence, discipline-first model reformed anyone at all.

That newer question mattered because both systems ultimately measured success by order inside the institution, quiet workshops, controlled cells, absence of escape or revolt, rather than by what happened to a person after release. Neither system tracked reoffending in any systematic way, and neither built in an incentive for a prisoner to demonstrate improved conduct in exchange for earlier release. That gap is what the reformatory movement, discussed next, set out to close.

The Cincinnati congress of 1870 issued a Declaration of Principles arguing that prisons should reward reformation with earlier release rather than hold every prisoner to a fixed term regardless of conduct. That principle took institutional form six years later at the Elmira Reformatory in New York, which opened in 1876 under superintendent Zebulon Brockway for male offenders between roughly sixteen and thirty years old, a group reformers judged still capable of genuine change.

Elmira combined three features that broke from both the Pennsylvania and Auburn models. First, an indeterminate sentence set only a minimum and maximum term rather than a fixed number of years. Second, a mark system graded each prisoner's daily conduct and work, with enough accumulated marks required to move up a grade and eventually qualify for release.

Third, release itself came as parole, supervision in the community rather than an unconditional discharge, with the possibility of return to custody for violating its terms.

By the time Brockway retired in 1900, versions of the Elmira model had been adopted by reformatories in states including Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois and Minnesota, and indeterminate sentencing combined with parole boards eventually became the dominant sentencing structure across most of the United States for much of the twentieth century. The shift also mattered internationally.

English penal reform after Pentonville moved through a similar sequence, initial separate confinement followed by graded stages of labour and privilege leading to conditional release, formalised in the progressive stage system associated with Walter Crofton's work in Ireland in the 1850s, which many historians treat as a parallel influence on Elmira's design.

The reformatory movement did not abandon the underlying premise that Pennsylvania and Auburn shared, that a prison regime could deliberately reshape character. It changed the incentive structure: instead of uniform discipline applied to everyone for a fixed term, release itself became the reward for demonstrated change, a logic that indeterminate sentencing and parole systems worldwide still apply, even where the reformatory label has long disappeared.