Extracting racial information about each of the prisoners represented in this data was a bit of a challenge, as I discuss in the “About” section, but race is a crucial component of making sense of the admissions data, especially since the timeframe of the data covers crucial antebellum years. The visualization of prisoner demographics confirms a largely unsurprising fact: there was a much higher percentage of black prisoners at Eastern State than the percentage of black residents in Pennsylvania overall. This observation makes a lot of sense if we think about Eastern State as one touchpoint in a long history of racialized mass incarceration, but there are some fascinating complicating factors behind these nubmers.
Firstly, while the exact mechanisms behind this discrepancy can't be determined through this data alone, looking at the types of offenses that prisoners were arrested for gives us very interesting insight into the issue. After grouping offenses by type, and eliminating ones that were relatively rare (see "About"), there are clear differences between the types of offenses that white prisoners were arrested for more often (bigamy, counterfeiting, and forgery) and the types of offenses that black prisoners were arrest for more often (assault and battery, burglary, and larceny). We can perhaps conclude that whereas white prisoners were mostly arrested for “non-violent” crimes, black prisoners were more often arrested for “violent” crimes. This is of course a somewhat artifical distiniction, and one that can be used to support a big range of different arguments. I want to focus on how we might understand these patterns in the particular context of Philadelphia and Eastern State.
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman writes:
Since 1780, Philadelphia had been a laboratory for the nation’s experiment in racial democracy and the premier stage on which the future after slavery was enacted….Before the Civil War, the city was home to the largest free black community in the country, and it boasted a small prosperous black elite. Then there was the underside: An outbreak of yellow fever in 1793 divided the city along racial lines. The black residents were blamed for the spread of the epidemic, conscripted to nurse the sick and cart the dead, and then excoriated for acts of theft and extortion rumored to have happened during the crisis. The Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 and inaugurated the practice of solitary confinement. The first prisoner was Charles Williams, a Negro. (86, emphasis mine)
Given this historical context, we can perhaps understand the attribution of violent crimes to black prisoners as part of the yellow fever-induced backlash that transformed the city. Hartman’s juxtaposition of the opening of Eastern State with this transformation in Philadelphia suggests that she understands the penitentiary as an extension of the city’s anti-black policies and attitudes. This claim is somewhat complicated by Eastern State’s status as an “enlightened prison,” which are premised on the philosophy of punishment called deterrence, [which] presumes that people commit crime when they are not prevented from doing so by fear of sanctions” (Brown and Barganier 345). Brown and Barganier suggest that these types of prisons were aimed specifically at white men, since they were understood to be “first and foremost ‘rational’” and would thus benefit the most from penitence and reflection.
In the critical literature on the history of prisons and imprisonment, especially those with abolitionist leanings, there is a tendency to compare prisoners to slaves and to discuss imprisonment as a form of involuntary servitude. In the introduction to The Prison and the American Imagination, Caleb Smith writes that the “civil death” experienced by prisoners “brought them very close to the ‘social death’ of the slave,” but insist that “many convicts, unlike slaves, were offered the promise of a new life in the world at large” and that “[t]hrough an ascetic discipline of self-abasement and penitent reflection, they might pass from the darkness of abjection into the light of subjectivity” (12-13). While an account like Smith’s is careful not to conflate in any simplistic terms the experiences of chattle slavery and imprisonment, what it fails to do is to think in any sustained way about racial difference internal to the prison system, and what ramifications this might have for the aims and experience of incarceration.
The very idea that prisoners can be recuperated into “the light of subjectivity” implies that the prisoners in questions have the potential to be subjects, and that they were not outside of the bounds of subjectivity to begin with. Afro-pessimist thinkers argue that blackness was constituted as the very outside (that “dark...abjection”) against which whiteness is defined, and thus the idea of recuperating prisoners into the light of subjectivity is one which only applies to white prisoners. The separation that Smith makes between prisoners and slaves doesn’t entirely hold, not because there are no meaningful differences betweeen those two subject positions, but because black prisoners’ experience of incarceration was inseparable from the dehumanizing and desubjectifying process of enslavement in a way that white prisoners, who ostensibly “begin” as full subjects, are not affect by.
Eastern State is often discussed as an experiment in a new regime of punishment and governance, “one based on spiritual engagement, not coercive violence; one that would reclaim rather than expel, that would preserve individual reputation instead of spreading infamy, and that would contain rather than extend the example of criminality” (Meranze 3). While most critics are quick to point out that this attempt at recuperating prisoners rather than punishing them was flawed and not nearly as humanitarian as its lofty goals suggested, there is comparatively far less attention paid to how race mediates this narrative of moral progress in prisons. Putting the idea of Eastern State’s structural innovations in the context of Hartman’s and Brown and Barganier’s observation, we could revise our understanding of Eastern State as representing not a generalized advancement in/revision of prison design, but instead as a racially differentiated system of punishment and recuperation. One stark example of this differentiation can be seen in Reverend Larcombe’s records of prisoner deaths during their sentence--the racial breakdown of those deaths is shown below.
By the dominant account of Eastern State, the penitentiary produced new forms of biopolitical life for white prisoners; as we can now see, it also produced new forms of social and literal death for black prisoners.