Discipline & Punish, pp. 123-126 & 237-239.
The penitentiary in Philadelphia has been most strongly associated with the "Separate System" of imprisonment, in which prisoners are confined to individual cells and not allowed to congregate with each other. The latter system was dubbed the "Auburn System" after a prison in New York, although the Ossining, NY prison is better known: Sing-Sing. The Eastern State Penitentiary in Cherry Hill/Fairmount replaced the original Walnut St. prison (on Walnut & 6th) when it opened in 1829.
Notice the radial spoke-like pattern
with the central panoptic rotunda.
Source: N.K. Teeters, The Prison at Philadelphia, Cherry Hill
(1957).
Eastern State in the 19th century. This area was known as Cherry Hill but is more commonly known by its current locals as Fairmount.
Source: N.K. Teeters, The Prison at Philadelphia, Cherry Hill (1957).
Source: N.K. Teeters, The Prison at Philadelphia, Cherry Hill (1957).
The Walnut St. jail facing Independence Square, 1789.
Source: N.K. Teeters, The Cradle of the Penitentiary (1955).
The penitentiary today.
Source: Link to image at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. Used with permission.
Foucault situates the Pennsylvania system within his description of the prison as an institution of discipline with very particular effects. One of the arguments of D&P is that the prison emerged from a set of competing ideas on how punishment would take place, and that it was not a "natural" consequence of a desire for more humanitarian methods. In fact, the prison is better thought of as a whole series of processes of power relations which discipline and mark the body. These power relations serve to alter people--they "correct" them; the prison therefore is not just a place of detention but is a place where people are made into subjects. Readers familiar with Foucault will recognise this as one of his abiding concerns.
Part of this apparatus was isolation (p. 236), designed to force the prisoner to reflect upon his crime and to become penitent (hence: penitentiary). The prison in Philadelphia provides the most famous example of this penitent isolation, much more so than the Auburn, NY model which allowed prisoners to interact during the day. Foucault rightly notes (p. 238) the cellular confinement having monastic origins (a related discussion on confession as both juridical and religious penance can be found in History of Sexuality Vol I). The early Philadelphians who developed this model, such as Robert Vaux, were Quakers or influenced by Quaker ideals, including the notion of "that of God in every man" (George Fox), and therefore that solitude could get people more in touch with this inner penitent self.
