Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Opened in 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was America’s most ambitious and innovative prison, with an exterior modeled on a medieval castle and an interior featuring pioneering “modern” concepts such as centrally heated individual cells with natural light, running water, and plumbing. Its Quaker-influenced founding philosophy, too, marked it as different: This was the world’s first real “penitentiary,” an institution designed to inspire true regret, or penitence, in the hearts of its prisoners.

Now known as Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, the facility closed its doors as a working prison in 1970. In the ensuing 46 years, the number of people in prisons in the United States has increased by 600%. A sprawling network of public and private facilities now holds 2.2 million prisoners, costing taxpayers $80 billion every year. In 1980, 41,000 people were in prison for drug crimes; by 2014, there were nearly half a million. And more than 5.8 million Americans cannot vote due to a felony conviction.

Those figures raise difficult questions about how the American prison system—and the nation itself—reached this point. A new exhibition at Eastern State, Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration, candidly examines these issues, and challenges viewers to consider potential answers centered on crime and justice. It also strives to humanize the men, women, and families impacted by mass incarceration.   

Sean Kelley, director of interpretation and public programming at Eastern State, draws on the exhibit’s content to illustrate how a criminal justice system often hidden from the view of most Americans carries implications for our wider society—and how its direction might be changed from both the inside and out.

Smithsonian.com examines why Eastern State Penitentiary’s philosophy of incarceration was a revolutionary and high-minded one in the 19th century, and how that Quaker-based approach eventually “collapsed under the weight of its own lofty morals."

Take a look inside the still-foreboding walls of Eastern State.