Appeared in revised form in The Angolite, July/August 2002, pp. 26-35.

The heavens are heavy and gray, spitting rain on this August Sunday morning in Philadelphia, and the gates of Eastern State Penitentiary are open to new arrivals. In 1829 these would have been the first convicts committed to the experimental new regimen of the Pennsylvania prison; almost 200 years later they are curious tourists coming to visit this relic of early America--long since emptied of prisoners and open now as a museum.

Eastern State occupies a long city block at the intersection of 22nd and Fairmount, located only five blocks north of the Philadelphia Museum of Art made famous in Rocky Balboa's early morning training runs. It seems odd, to one whose prison visits more often take him to isolated rural locales, to find this prison completely surrounded by the city. Why did they stick it here, the question comes to mind?

The answer is, when the prison was authorized and designed in 1821, its location was well out in the country, more than a mile from old Philadelphia. The city grew to encircle the prison by the end of the Civil War, and moved far beyond it in later years, giving it the strange feeling of a fortress plunked down in the middle of homes, businesses, and churches.

Cherry Hill, the area was called in the 1820s, when the Pennsylvania legislature took up the issue of new prison construction. The old Walnut Street Jail, which had opened in 1776 at 6th and Walnut downtown, had not been able to keep up with the numbers of sentenced prisoners coming into the system. One wing of the jail had been called a "penitentiary" since 1790, meaning that it applied the reformist principles of the Quaker leaders of Philadelphia, but its basic design was that of an old colonial jail. What was needed was a new design, an architecture incorporating the spirit of reformation into physical space. The legislature approved the project in 1821 and offered a $100 prize for the winning design.

John Haviland, a young British-born architect just starting his career, won the prize with a startling radial design unlike anything ever before seen in a prison. Haviland's Eastern State featured seven cellblocks radiating like spokes from a central rotunda. The facade of the prison, fronting on Fairmount Avenue, would resemble a Scottish castle from the later middle ages. A thirty-foot tall wall would enclose the site, sealing the convicts in, and sealing the world out.

Haviland ended up being placed in charge of constructing the prison from his design. His original budget, which as we know often means very little as massive public works projects begin, was $100,000. Construction began in May 1822 and continued, one cellblock at a time, until the last of the original seven blocks was completed in 1836.

Standing in Cell Block 1, our guide, Joe Seymour, describes the construction of the prison. Seymour is a graduate student in military history at Temple University. He says he knew little about the penitentiary when he applied to work there, but he has since become fascinated with the history of the place.

The 30 tourists, several from outside the United States, wear hard hats. Parts of the prison are falling in. "Mostly the newer parts," Seymour says. The original cellblocks were more sturdily built. The cell blocks and the walls were built from fieldstones hauled from several miles away--cut to fit and mortared together. The stones in the floor are huge, from two by three feet up to almost five feet square. While rain drips through holes in the roof and drops splatter sporadically on our green plastic hats, this part of the prison seems structurally very sound.

"It was built to last," Seymour says, and it has, though the prison philosophy inherent in the design changed several times in the 150 years of the prison's life. Haviland's original design incorporated the principles of Quaker reformative imprisonment--complete isolation of inmates, fair treatment, and opportunity for work, reflection, and reformation.

In contrast to the oppressive, claustrophobic environment of many more recently constructed prisons, Eastern State's atmosphere is open and expansive. The corridors are wide, high, and arching. The cells are about ten feet long and eight feet wide (officially seven-and-a-half by twelve), but the ceilings are very high, fifteen feet or more. Considering that prisoners in modern cells are provided only 35 square feet of floor space according to American Correctional Association standards, these cells are positively spacious.

At Seymour's invitation, we step up into a cell through a five-and-a-half foot door and stand inside, looking around. It is warm in the open air this morning; the cells are damp and very humid. "Prisoners used to put their mattresses on the floor to sleep in summer," Seymour says. This must be a universal convict response to summer heat.

This is an empty cell, dominated by three features. In the corner is a toilet. "They say flush toilets," Seymour says, "but not a flush toilet like you think of them today." The cell toilets drained into a trench below that was flushed twice a week from the nearby waterworks. Overhead is a skylight. Each original cell had a skylight, necessary for daytime illumination but also to serve a symbolic purpose. It represented "the eye of God," Seymour says, the idea that God was watching each convict alone in his cell.

The third feature is a door, in the back wall of the cell. Its significance is emphasized when we step back out into the corridor and Seymour points out that the front door to the cell was originally not there. "There was only a small opening through which food could be passed. No door."

A European woman looks very startled at this concept and in slow English asks the obvious question, "How did they get into the cells?"

"Through the back door," Seymour replies. "Through the exercise yard." Exercise yard? What kind of place was this?

It was a place, first and foremost, of solitary confinement. When a prisoner was received into custody, he was admitted through the castle gate in front. A woolen hood was placed over his head, and a guard led him down the corridor into the central rotunda. From there he went outside. Each cell had attached to it an individual exercise yard, ten by eight feet square, the same size as the cell. A gate opened into this yard, and an interior gate into the back wall of the cell. Once inside the cell, the hood was removed, and the convict was home--even if he had no idea where home was. For the duration of his sentence, he would remain in his cell and the attached exercise yard--twice a day for 30 minutes at a time. He would never see any other part of the prison or have direct contact with other convicts. This separation was part of the Quaker plan--to maintain the isolation necessary for penitent reflection and to prevent the contamination that would occur if the convicts were allowed to mingle.

By now the tourists are beginning to nod their heads at the genius of this prison. We have a tendency to view old prisons ahistorically, as if they had sprung into ancient society fully formed. But it is becoming more clear that this is a modern institution deliberately designed to achieve its purpose. Its features were not accidents nor were they fixed by history; from the start, Eastern State was intended to differ from earlier models of confinement.

Corrections historians tell us that early places of confinement were often no more than caves or holes that could be secured in some fashion. The Mamertine Prison, which was a dungeon under the sewers of Rome, is often identified as the first known ancient prison. The early Christians were kept there along with other political and religious criminals, until they were killed in the arena, sold into slavery, or otherwise disposed of.

As places of confinement, the dungeons of ancient and medieval times held two types of prisoners--those ordinary criminals who were awaiting trial or the imposition of punishment, such as death, banishment, or flogging; and those who were being stored for some reason--debt perhaps, or more often espousing radical political or religious views--and who were subject to indefinite detention in the interests of social order. Through the early 1700s, the punishment imposed on offenders after conviction was likely to be physical in one form or another. Not often were convicted criminals sentenced to a term of incarceration in prison, as we expect to happen to serious felons today. The early prisons thus served more the function of what we call jails today than what we call prisons, or penitentiaries. They were places of detention; the punishment came after they were removed from detention.

Colonial jails in 17th and 18th century America looked nothing like modern prisons. They were simply public buildings, often one-room structures resembling houses, that held people awaiting trial or punishment. Men and women, boys and girls, debtors, vagrants, paupers, thieves and robbers, runaway slaves and indentured servants, the mentally ill, killers and sexual deviants, all were mixed together in confinement, typically in conditions of vice, idleness, filth, malnourishment, disease, and despair. John Howard, the English sheriff and jail reformer of the late 1700s, pointed out that more criminals died in English jails during this era than were executed. American jails were no better.

When the civic-minded Quakers of Philadelphia met at Benjamin Franklin's house in 1787, they decided to form the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. Two centuries later the organization is known as the Pennsylvania Prison Society. Under the leadership of Dr. Benjamin Rush, the society's initial objective was to improve conditions in the Walnut Street Jail downtown. The society objected to the public degradation of prisoners on work details (like modern day chain gangs), to prisoners fed so meagerly that they were reduced to begging for food, to the jail's lack of sanitation and security, and to the absence of classification of inmates. In the more spiritual realm, the Quakers believed the jail ignored "the inner light" within each person, which they believed would be brought out by solitary confinement.

In 1789 and 1790, the Pennsylvania legislature passed laws to accomplish several reforms. John Roberts's Reform and Retribution: An Illustrated History of American Prisons calls the redesigned Walnut Street Jail "arguably the world's first penitentiary, because it carried out incarceration as punishment, implemented a rudimentary classification system, featured individual cells, and was intended to provide a place for offenders to do penance--hence the term `penitentiary.'"

The term "penitentiary" had already been in use for several years in England and Europe, suggesting an ideal place in which criminals would be humanely housed and provided with the opportunity to reform themselves. But it remained for the Philadelphia reformers to give physical form to this ideal--to create a building to apply enlightened theory. This they did in 1790, with the construction of a new, three-story wing added to the Walnut Street Jail. John Roberts writes:

It was that wing that became the prototype of the modern penitentiary. Convicted felons were housed in that wing--some in individual cells--separated from the rest of the inmate population. A work program was developed within the prison, with inmates engaged in handicrafts such a shoemaking, weaving, cutting and polishing marble, and grinding plaster of paris. Finally, through the work programs and the remorse and penitential reflection that was supposed to occur during incarceration, it was hoped that the inmates would undergo a period of correction; therefore, the Walnut Street Jail indeed had come to fit the definition of a "correctional" institution.

Soon other states began to adopt variations of the Walnut Street Jail model. Newgate Prison opened in New York City in 1797. New Jersey, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maryland opened new prisons over the next decade, and Sing Sing and Auburn prisons in New York and Pittsburgh in western Pennsylvania were under construction a few years later. Each of these prisons was different from its counterparts--in architectural style, daily regimen, method of discipline, and social environment--as prison designers sought the "perfect" correctional model. Philadelphia's reformers found their own penitentiary regimen promising enough to argue for its adoption on a grander, more permanent scale, but improving the lot of convicts does not appear to have taken high priority among Pennsylvania's public officials. Almost forty years would pass before the Walnut Street Jail's felons would be moved into their new home at Eastern State.

Eastern State's first warden, Samuel R. Wood, welcomed the prison's first inmate, Charles Williams, late in 1829. An exhibit in the museum's history collection describes Williams as an 18-year-old man, five feet seven, with "light black skin," a farmer by trade and able to read. For the theft of a gold watch, a gold key, and a three dollar seal, he was given a two year sentence.

A photo exhibit in a cell block corridor identifies Inmate No. 6 as John Currin, convicted of horse theft in Lancaster County and given a two year sentence. In those days, good behavior reductions were not in use at Eastern State, although good time was already in practice at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Parole had not yet been invented. Currin arrived November 17, 1829, and was discharged November 17, 1831, serving every day of his two-year sentence.

"Behind the Walls," the museum's guidebook, indicates that the sentences of Williams and Currin were typical for that time. "In the 1830s and 1840s the most common offenses included burglary, robbery, and horse theft. Sentences averaged two-and-a-half years but could last up to 21 years for murder or kidnapping."

Hung on the wall in Cell Block One is a lithograph dated July 1830. It shows the front of the prison, set like a castle in the midst of a country landscape. In its appearance and its regimen, it could easily pass for a medieval monastery, a term Seymour applies to the institution as we move down the corridor toward the Central Rotunda.

Seymour points out that Haviland was continuing to build new cellblocks as inmates were being transferred into Eastern State. The original plan called for seven cellblocks radiating from the Central Rotunda; they were to house 250 men and women inmates. When the first three single-story cell blocks filled up as they opened, Haviland changed the architecture (and in a sense permanently defeated his own skylight and exercise yard design) to add a second story to cell blocks four through seven. This would increase the capacity to 450.

When construction of the original prison was completed in 1836, the total cost was computed at $780,000, far beyond its original $100,000 budget. It was the most expensive public building in America at the time and one of the most admired. Tourists came from all over America and Europe to view this modern marvel--this building that claimed to change criminals into godfearing, law-abiding good citizens. Seymour tells our group of visitors that in the 1830s and 1840s the two biggest tourist attractions in the United States were Niagara Falls and Eastern State. Eastern State sold tickets to visitors and averaged up to 200 visitors a day during the summer months.

Among the more distinguished visitors to tour Eastern State in its early years were the young French magistrates Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville and the young English author Charles Dickens. Tocqueville and Beaumont came to Philadelphia in 1831 as part of their tour of American prisons. Dickens visited in 1842.

Scott Christianson's With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America, describes the former visit:

Beaumont and Tocqueville visited Eastern Penitentiary eight times over twelve days in October 1831, two years after it opened. They said it was "incontestable that this perfect isolation secures the prisoner from all fatal contamination." Eastern's officials were stunned when Tocqueville asked for permission to interview each convict alone in his cell without a keeper present, but they were so convinced of their system's merits that they granted his wish. Not only was he allowed to tour the institution but to his credit he privately conversed with 46 inmates in their solitary cells, pencilling meticulous notes about what he found. When Tocqueville asked one veteran convict whether he thought the new penitentiary was superior to the old prison, the man replied, "It is as if you asked me if the sun were more beautiful than the moon."

Joe Seymour, our modern day tour guide, describes inmate life in the secular monastery of the 1830s as Beaumont and Tocqueville would have seen it. A prisoner spent all his time in his cell alone. He got outside to exercise twice a day. He was required to work in his cell. Prisoners could practice a variety of manual trades--weaving, leather-working, carpentry, and shoe-making. The keepers brought the inmates three meals a day, putting the dishes through the narrow slots in the iron front door of the cell. Inmates could have a Bible and one other book at a time; no letters, magazines, or newspapers were allowed.

"Behind the Walls" describes the extremes to which the prison went to maintain complete solitude for each inmate:

Since the walls are about two feet thick, conversation between neighbors was almost impossible. Heating pipes ran outside the cell along the corridor to prevent inmates from tapping out messages.... Guards wore socks over their shoes in order to silence their footsteps to spy on inmates. All social contact inside the prison was banned, and ties with the outside world were also restricted. Prisoners were permitted to send and receive only one letter per year. With the exception of occasional visits by prison or church officials, inmates could not meet with any visitors.

This was the model of self-containment in which reformation was intended to take place. Was it working? Beaumont and Tocqueville seemed to think so. Tocqueville interviewed Charles Williams, Inmate No. 1, and had these observations:

This man works with ardor; he makes ten pairs of shoes a week. His mind seems very tranquil; his disposition excellent. He considers his being brought to the Penitentiary as a signal benefit of Providence. His thoughts are in general religious. He read to us in the Gospel the parable of the good shepherd, the meaning of which touched him deeply; one who was born of a degraded and depressed race, and had never experienced any thing but indifference and harshness.

Charles Dickens reported more mixed feelings. He visited on March 8, 1842, spending a whole day touring the prison, talking with inmates--men and women, black, white, mulatto, many recent immigrants among them--in their individual cells, listening to the prison's sounds of silence. The inmates that he saw struck him as more pained and pathetic than penitent.

In American Notes, for General Circulation, published in 1842, Dickens wrote that while he was impressed by the prison keepers' "excellent motives" and the institution's "perfect order:"

The system here, is rigid, strict, and hopeless solitary confinement. I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong. In its intention, I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and mean for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who devised this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentlemen who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing.... I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body, and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it exhorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

The inmates he met--a wretched German thief; a tall black burglar; a "fat old negro whose leg had been taken off," attended by a classical scholar and an accomplished surgeon, himself a prisoner; three young women, in for robbery, who had "grown to be quite beautiful;" a crushed and broken sailor who had already served eleven years in solitary confinement--seemed lost in Eastern State's "solitary horrors:"

Every cell has double doors: the outer one of sturdy oak, the other of grated iron, wherein there is a trap through which his food is handed. He has a Bible, and a slate and pencil, and, under certain restrictions, has sometimes other books, provided for the purpose, and pen and ink and paper. His razor, plate, and can, and basin, hang upon the wall, or shine upon the little shelf. Fresh water is laid on in every cell, and he can draw it at his pleasure. During the day, his bedstead turns up against the wall, and leaves more space for him to work in. His loom, or bench, or wheel, is there, and there he labours, sleeps and wakes, and counts the seasons as they change, and grows old.

Dickens's doubts were insufficient to stem the worldwide tide of enthusiasm for Eastern State's model of reform. As we stand in the center of the old prison, the Central Rotunda, Seymour tells us that at least 300 prisons around the world were designed to incorporate this prison's architectural and reformation model--both built on the idea of inmate labor under complete solitary confinement.

The Central Rotunda was the hub of Eastern's original wheel. Through its arched doors guards could look down each of the seven cell block corridors; a guard could make a round of the entire prison in less than a minute. With no doors on their cells, inmates had no direct access to the corridors outside.

The rotunda today is a big, round, mostly empty room. We wander around peering down the corridors and looking at a miniature replica of the original prison displayed under glass.

We step outside for a closer look at the rest of the prison, including the new cell blocks, numbered 8 to 15, that were added between 1877 and 1959. Seymour points to where the warden and his family lived in a tower apartment atop the Administration Building. Eastern State lore has it that the first escape was from the warden's tower. The warden's inmate "butler" tied bedsheets together, stole the silverware, and fled. The inmate was soon recaptured, and, begging forgiveness, was given his old job back. Alas, in an all too modern tale of tragedy and recidivism, the inmate escaped again in the same way a few weeks later, and was recaptured again, and this time not given a position of trust--"second chance" does not mean unlimited chance.

No guards would have been posted on Eastern State's walls in the early years. No inmates were on the yard or walking around the compound, so there would have been nothing for wall guards to watch out for; there was no perceived need for perimeter security. Some of the guards did live in rooms in the southeast tower. When Eastern State abandoned solitary confinement (unofficially after the Civil War and officially in 1913), guard towers were built over the Central Rotunda and on each of the corners, and guards on the walls became a fixture at Eastern State as in other congregate prisons of the era.

What happened to defeat Eastern State's lofty ideals in the 30 years between its opening and the start of the Civil War? Seymour says that for one thing, the prison felt the constant pressure of overcrowding. The easiest way to deal with an influx of new inmates within existing architectural constraints is to double bunk inmates--putting two into the space formerly occupied by one, or four into two. He says the post-Civil War era was very important. "It brought in large numbers of `war prisoners,' young men whose lives were thrown off track by the war."

"Behind the Walls" offers two additional reasons:

Isolation also caused some prisoners to suffer psychologically, leading critics to condemn solitary confinement as cruel and inhumane punishment. In addition, keeping a large inmate population in solitary confinement was expensive. Inmates could only do individual hand work in their cells, so the prison could not profit from factory labor to produce more goods, as other prisons did.

Looking at the evolution of the penitentiary in the nineteenth century, this last motive appears particularly important. In its origins the penitentiary was recommended for its humane, reformative purposes; but over time, as its purpose came to be defined as housing convicts--the dregs of society--the emphasis shifted from goals to means--to cheapness, productivity, and efficient management. From convicts laboring and meditating in their solitary confinement cells, the image of the penitentiary changed to convicts working together under severe discipline to produce goods that would be sold to pay for their own upkeep. The reform model changed to the labor model, and the penitentiary changed from a monastery to a factory.

One other point can be made about the general reformative purpose of the penitentiary--the notion that criminal behavior could be eliminated or reduced by confining criminals. Where previous societies had emphasized the infliction of pain, through physical punishments, or banishment, fines, or indentured servitude, the penitentiary emphasized a combination of time and a very restricted environment in imposing criminal penalties. It was a punishment much more suited to the rationality of the Enlightenment, to ideas about the progress of civilization; but in fact it worked no better in controlling crime than the earlier, abandoned, more primitive methods. By the latter part of the 1800s, when Eastern State was giving up on the isolate model, many of America's progressive penologists were giving up on the penitentiary.

The "new" ideal institution was the reformatory, born from the criticisms of what the penitentiary had turned into within its first half century of life. The official birth of the reformatory was the meeting of the National Prison Association in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1870. This National Prison Congress, as it was called, was attended by correctional reformers from around the world. They agreed that prisons were not accomplishing what they were intended to do, and they adopted a "Declaration of Principles" advocating reform. Number one on their list was: "Reformation, not vindictive suffering, as the purpose of penal treatment."

The reformatory would replace the penitentiary's solitary penance with more modern practices--education, vocational training, moral instruction, physical conditioning--which emphasized the role of the state in changing behavior through programs. This would later be called the birth of rehabilitation in prison, as secular views of humanity replaced more traditional religious views.

In scarcely half a century, the penitentiary had gone from an institution representing optimism and hope of change to an institution representing suffering and mistreatment as observed by the people running it. Norman Johnston's book on the history of Eastern State is subtitled, A Crucible of Good Intentions; we should all be able to recall which part of the universe is paved with "good intentions."

I left Eastern State after noon on this rainy Sunday, having spent most of my time touring the old cell blocks and the rotunda. I returned two days later, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, to take a more complete look at the museum's permanent exhibits and to take my time looking at the newer cell blocks and the prison yard at greater length. My guide to Eastern State's more modern history was another of the museum's young tour guides, Tom Parry, who has a B.A. in history from Temple University.

On Sunday, under cloudy, rainy skies, Eastern State had merely looked misplaced, like a Scottish castle that had wandered off the moors to settle in Philadelphia. On this sunny afternoon, it looks no more at home, and it looks much older, the bright sunlight illuminating the features of old age. The weathered stone facade and the rusted iron bars and gates look like ruins from the Roman Empire. It is hard to imagine that convicts were kept here until 30 years ago.

Eastern State has been shut down since 1971, and most of it is off limits to tourists as being physically unsafe. "The new cell blocks are worse than the old," Parry says as we walk around. He points to plaster falling from lattice-work frames. "They were more shabbily constructed."

Cell Blocks 8, 9, and 10 were built in 1877 using inmate labor. By this time, inmates were not only working together but they were sharing cells in some parts of the prison--the separate model was gradually yielding to Auburn's congregate model, though without the large industrial buildings characteristic of many of the Auburn-style prisons.

As Eastern State increased its inmate population, it remained completely contained within its original four walls. The wall is said to be a little more than half a mile around, enclosing a plot about eleven acres in size, or about four city blocks. By the Civil War, the city had grown out to Cherry Hill; the prison was surrounded by a mixed business and residential neighborhood known as Fairmount.

From seven cellblocks intended to house 250 inmates in one-person cells, Eastern State grew to 15 cell blocks containing 980 cells. Throughout the 20th century, its population ranged from 1,000 to 1,700. New cell blocks had to be squeezed in between older buildings. After solitary confinement was officially abandoned in 1913, the prison had to find room for an industrial building, workshops, a chapel and laundry, a kitchen and dining hall, hobby shops, a barber shop, a library (over the rotunda), and other functions necessary to the congregate prison. Inmates were allowed two hours of yard time each day.

Parry shows us the old baseball field outside Cell Block 4. The narrow triangular field, now completely overgrown with thistles, faces the prison wall. Atop the wall is a "flycatcher," a fence intended to stop fly balls from going over the wall. In an early form of "home run derby," inmates would drive balls high into the air, trying to clear the fence and reach Brown Street on the other side of the wall. Neighborhood kids waited on the other side of the wall to retrieve the balls and throw them back over the wall. Babe Ruth visited the prison and played ball with the inmates in the 1920s. Whether he hit a homer for them is not recorded.

Parry tells our group that the decade after the end of World War I was a turbulent time at Eastern State. Three more cellblocks had been added, and the inmate population had increased to 1,700. Overcrowding was a problem, and security had not kept pace with the influx of inmates. Twice in the 1920s groups of inmates escaped over the wall using prison-made ladders--one group of six men and the other a group of three. Leo Callahan, one of the three men who threw a rope ladder over the wall and escaped in 1923, is listed as the only Eastern State escapee never recaptured or accounted for. During this era the prison was rocked by other scandals--nine inmate-run whiskey stills were destroyed in one shakedown, and authorities were embarrassed by the discovery of a prostitution ring that brought female prostitutes inside the prison.

As often happens in the aftermath of such events, a new warden, John C. Groom, retired from the Pennsylvania State Police, was brought in to regain control. His mission was to convert Eastern State into an ordinary maximum security prison. He hired new guards and imposed stricter security. He also oversaw the construction of Cell Block 14 in 1926. This three-story concrete building served as the prison's reception center for new inmates and also separated young offenders from older inmates. Steel bars strung between the walkways on the second and third floors are called "bodycatchers;" they were intended to keep bodies or large objects from being thrown from the tiers onto the concrete floor below.

In the basement of Cell Block 14, Warden Groom had six cells built--each of them six feet square. These became known collectively as "the hole," where inmates were stripped naked and isolated for misconduct. One hundred years after Eastern State opened to promote solitary confinement as a reformative tool, solitary confinement in the New Eastern State was used only for punishment.

But even in the new regime, some inmates fared better than others. When Al Capone was arrested in a Philadelphia movie theater for carrying a firearm in 1929, he spent ten months in a cell in the new part of the prison, where Cell Blocks 8 and 9 come together in an intersection called "Park Avenue." Capone's cell, which was not locked at night, has been restored to 1929 condition, which in his case meant antique furniture, an Oriental rug on the floor, an oil painting on the wall, access to a telephone, and a cabinet radio.

After Capone, Eastern State's next most famous inmate was Willie Sutton, the gentleman bank robber, who served a long stretch at the prison in the 1940s and 1950s. Sutton was a participant in Eastern State's "great escape," the morning of April 3, 1945. Clarence Klinedinst, a trusty stonemason, spent a year-and-a-half digging a 90-foot tunnel under the prison wall. Twelve men, including Sutton, got through the tunnel and popped up outside the wall, at the corner of 22nd and Fairmount, then took off in all directions. All of them were soon recaptured, and Klinedinst lost his digging tools.

The last new housing unit opened at Eastern was Cell Block 15. Opened in 1959, it contained only 30 cells, 15 up and 15 down. The 15 upstairs cells were Death Row, where inmates were held until they were moved to the prison at Rockview for execution. The 15 downstairs cells became the new, improved "hole," where the most difficult-to-manage inmates were isolated.

In one of the old cell block corridors hangs a large photo titled, "December 1960." It shows a group of about a dozen black inmates gathered in front of a Christmas tree set up in the corridor; a white guard in uniform stands to one side. This photo is a reminder that segregation was not a purely Southern practice. Eastern State had been open at this point for 131 years, and it was still just as segregated as it was in 1829, when the black teenager Charles Williams became Inmate No. 1. Black inmates were housed in Cell Blocks 4 and 5, two of the oldest and most overcrowded housing units. Segregation in the housing units ended in 1961.

Throughout the 1960s, Pennsylvania prison officials discussed shutting down Eastern State. Maintenance costs and its old-fashioned design made it an expensive relic trying to pose as a modern prison. It was closed briefly in 1970 but quickly reopened when temporary housing was needed in the aftermath of a riot at another Philadelphia prison. The next year, 1971, Eastern State closed for good.

Which presented an important if infrequent dilemma: "What do you do with an old prison?" Joe Seymour had said on Sunday that several options were discussed. First the state sold the prison back to the city. Then the city considered demolition, or turning it into condominiums (which as we know, Rocky Balboa of Philadelphia said he had no use for). Then, Seymour said, something happened in society: "The prison began to become interesting." By 1988 historians and preservationists were working to save the abandoned prison. In 1994 the Pennsylvania Prison Society reopened Eastern State as a museum. More than 50,000 visitors from around the world toured Eastern State last year, far more than in its heyday in the 1830s and 1840s.

Since the reopening, restoration has proceeded one step at a time as funds become available. Most of the prison has not been restored. Plaster walls are tumbling down. Trees grow though cell block roofs. Paint peels on concrete walls. Metal rusts away, cracks are everywhere. From the front, Eastern State looks great; but on the inside, it has rotted away.

What has happened to Eastern State physically is what has happened to the penitentiary philosophically over the past two centuries--its optimism has been eaten away by the reality of incarceration. At its core, what is the purpose of the modern prison? We know that it is retributive punishment, taking its measure of time equivalent to harm done. We know that it is incapacitative, protecting society (free society, if not prison society) from the criminal so long as he is confined. Beyond this, we do not know. As to any positive effect on the individual criminal locked away inside it, this remains a mystery as thick and impenetrable as the old wall of Eastern State.

You can take a virtual tour (which is never as good as the real thing) of Eastern State Penitentiary at its web site: www.EasternState.org. The penitentiary is also featured in a History Channel "Big House" episode on early prisons. Several art exhibits by prison inmates and free world artists are on display each year. The museum and prison grounds are open to visitors from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. weekends in May, September, and October, Wednesday through Sunday in the summer. Call the penitentiary at (215)236-3300 when you are in Philadelphia.