II.
Development of Penal System of Pennsylvania.
The most inspiring and significant chapter in the history of penology is not the achievement of John Howard in redeeming the common gaols of England from the degradation into which they had fallen, nor of Lord Romilly in his lifelong struggle against the barbarities of the English penal laws, but the leadership which for more than a century the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania gave to the world both in prison reform and in the amelioration of the penal code. The two former were the revolt of sensitive and humane natures against hoary abuses; but the latter was all this and something more. It was a bold and imaginative reconstruction of the whole basis of penal discipline. As far back as the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Quaker colonists of Pennsylvania introduced for the first time the practice of employing imprisonment at hard labor as the ordinary method of punishing anti-social action. After the reversion of the American colonies for fifty years to the barbarous criminal jurisprudence of the mother country, Pennsylvania was the first State, the first community in the world, to break with this system and to substitute imprisonment for the various brutal and degrading types of corporal punishment. The Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, in 1790, was the earliest institution in America in which these more enlightened principles were put into practice. From this second beginning, for a period of forty years, Pennsylvania was elaborating and perfecting the first of the two great systems of penal administration which were destined to dominate the penology of the civilized world during the nineteenth century—the separate confinement of malefactors. Visited, admired and imitated by large numbers of eminent and enthusiastic European penologists, the Eastern Penitentiary at Cherry Hill was the pivotal point linking American and European penology for more than a generation after 1830.
Then followed that long period of inertia, of lassitude, of marking time, which is so apt to succeed to a period of ardent reforming energy and which to this very day has maintained its spell over the State and the Nation.
Not that there have not in the last half century been notable improvements in the theory and practice of penal administration, some of them bold enough to bring America from time to time into the forefront of interest and example to the penologists of the Old World, but in most of these the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has been content to play a secondary role. Throughout this era of slackened energy she has not cared or dared to initiate, to lead, to “carry on,” but has followed belatedly and afar off the progress of other States. Examples of this are the Auburn congregate system, which divided with the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement the interest of European as well as of American penologists, and which was adopted in the Western Penitentiary in 1869, a full generation after its establishment in New York State, and which has only recently conquered the parent institution on Cherry Hill; the justly famous Elmira experiment of progressive classification and industrial training of inmates embodied in the Huntingdon Reformatory in 1889, and the long-promised reformatory for women at Muncy, which, six years after its creation by legislative action, has not yet been rendered available for the purpose for which it was designed.
The first step in the development of an intelligent conception of delinquency and its treatment came not in an accurate conception of the nature of crime and its causes, but in a clearer and more correct notion of the function of punishment. By 1790 the element of deterrence in punishment was recognized and emphasized. The element of reformation was a cardinal point in the theory and practice of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, and this Society did its best to infuse this doctrine into the Pennsylvania system of prison administration. Before 1830 it was very generally asserted that reformation, as well as deterrence and social revenge, was to be regarded as a chief aim of punishment, though the offender was still regarded as an unregenerate free moral agent.
This theory of crime received a severe shock in the “forties” from the investigations of Dorothea L. Dix and others, who showed the great prevalence of insanity and idiocy among the delinquent classes. It could scarcely be denied even by the traditional jurists that the exercise of free will was likely to be seriously impeded by insanity or feeble-mindedness. From 1850 to the beginning of the present century the most notable advances toward a more intelligent conception of crime and its treatment consisted in the gradual but definite triumph of the notion of detention and punishment as agencies for reformation rather than as instruments of social revenge.
For more than a century of its history the penal, reformatory and correctional institutions of Pennsylvania were limited to the county jails and the few and scattered workhouses, which were erected mainly in conjunction with the almshouses. In the jails there could be no approach to anything like a differentiated treatment of delinquents. In them were herded promiscuously those imprisoned for debt, those convicted of crime and those accused or held as witnesses; those of all ages and both sexes; those convicted of all categories and grades of crime punishable by imprisonment; those of all mental states—normal, feeble-minded, neurotic, psychotic, epileptic. The few colonial workhouses were employed as little more than an agency for suppressing vagrancy.
The first step in a differentiated treatment of crime and criminals came with the erection of a semi-state prison in the Walnut Street Jail in 1789-90. This provided for a partial differentiation between those convicted of the more serious crimes and those convicted of petty offenses or awaiting trial. It did not however, attempt any scientific differentiation on the basis of age, sex or mental state. Children and adults, male and female, sane and insane, were confined in contiguity. The opening of the State penitentiaries at Allegheny and Philadelphia in 1826 and 1829, with their fundamental principle of solitary confinement, carried further the process of differentiation, but still continued to apply the same general type of treatment to all incarcerated inmates. It was a system of separation rather than of a differentiated treatment of special types of prisoners.
The second important development in the direction of specialization in the provision of institutional treatment of delinquents appeared in the establishment of a House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents in Philadelphia in 1828. Though this was at first a private rather than a State institution and was of very limited capacity, it marked an epoch in the progress of Pennsylvania penology by making possible some elementary differentiation on the basis of age, degree of criminality and relative susceptibility to reformation. The next attempt at further differentiation came with the erection of the State Hospital for the Insane at Harrisburg between 1841 and 1851, chiefly as a result of the agitation initiated by Dorothea L. Dix. This and the other State hospitals for the insane, subsequently erected, provided for a treatment of the more important types of mental disorder, though no adequate provision was made for removing the insane from the prison. Not until 1905 was an act passed providing for the erection of a State hospital for the criminal insane at Fairview which was opened in 1912.
During the quarter of a century following 1850 there was an active agitation to provide a means of differentiating the treatment of criminals on the basis of age, sex and degree of criminality. The first important achievement in this direction was the further development of reform schools for juvenile delinquents through the removal and enlargement of the Philadelphia House of Refuge in 1850-54 and the erection of the Western House of Refuge at Allegheny during the same period. Juvenile delinquents, if petty offenders, could thereafter be removed from their degrading confinement in the state prison or worse county jails and receive the properly specialized treatment which their circumstances demanded. No provision for the differentiated treatment of the less definite and confirmed types of adult delinquents was made until the opening of the reformatory for men at Huntingdon in 1889 and the authorization of the State Industrial Home for Women at Muncy in 1913. The provision of reformatories and juvenile correctional institutions marked a double process of differentiation, in that these institutions not only called for a diversity of treatment according to age, sex and degree of criminality, but also from the fact that they were clearly differentiated from the State prisons and the county jails in making reformation rather than punishment or detention their chief aims.