In Defense of Flogging Read Online Free PDF Page A

county sheriff . . . in no way disposed to permit the ministers to enter the prison to preach their sermon.” But the fact that Reynolds, a former tavern owner, had little desire to humor teetotaling, Bible-thumping preachers and their newfangled theories of criminality is not entirely surprising. As
jailer, Reynolds was not paid, so he earned a living as best he could. Said his opponents: “One reason why all the prisoners, without discrimination, are admitted into the hall together is that liquor is sold at the door by small measure, by the gaoler.” Well, of course it was. Alcohol was a major part of civic life, and teetotaling made little sense—especially not in jail, and surely not if you sold the booze.
    Reynolds may have been unpopular with Philadelphia prison reformers, but he was not without friends in high places. Starting in 1785, five years before Pennsylvania’s great criminal justice reforms, Reynolds’s boss was General Thomas Procter of Revolutionary War fame. Procter, in turn, just happened to be a friend and drinking buddy of President George Washington. Presumably this made Procter no friend of Benjamin Rush, who was long Washington’s political adversary.
    Still, though it took five years, Rush’s reformers eventually won. In 1795 Reynolds left the jail, and Walnut Street Jail transformed into the Walnut Street Penitentiary. The prisoners, naturally, were terrified of the reformers’ vision. On the evening of the first day of the “grand experiment,” the prisoners voted with their feet in a mass jailbreak; 15
of them succeeded. After that, however, things settled into a grim normalcy. Between 45 and 145 prisoners entered Walnut Street annually, but actual solitary confinement facilities were available for only a third of those admitted. The rest “lie on the floor, on a blanket, and about thirty sleep in one room; they are strictly prohibited from keeping their clothes on at night”—and that from a sympathetic account. The new penitentiary prohibited alcohol and segregated prisoners by race, sex, and type of crime. Furthermore, “hardened criminals” were kept from first-time offenders. Many of these basic concepts of categorization are still with us—even racial segregation. California prisons, for instance, openly practiced racial segregation until 2005 and still haven’t resolved issues of racially based gangs.
    Looking back at some of these prison reformers’ writings, it’s striking how they could be so knowingly cruel and even sadistic despite their supposedly good intentions. In an 1811 account, one doctor proudly noted that the guards at Walnut Street carried “no weapons, not even a stick.” Fine, but instead of whipping prisoners, the prison guards withheld food to maintain order. Because families could no longer visit and provide for their locked-up
loved ones, the prison officials had total control over the inmates:
    The solitary cells and low diet have on all occasions been found amply sufficient to bring down the most determined spirit, to tame the most hardened villain that ever entered them. Of the truth of this there are striking cases on record. Some veterans in vice, with whom it was necessary to be severe, have declared their preference of death by the gallows, to a further continuance in that place of torment. In the cells, the construction of which renders conversation among those confined in them difficult, the miserable man is left to the greatest of all possible punishments, his own reflections. His food, which consists of only half a pound of bread per day, is given him in the morning; in the course of a few days or weeks the very nature of the being is changed.
    With a half loaf of bread a day for weeks, this “humane” replacement to flogging literally starved men into submission. At this point, the ideals of reformation already seem lost.

    As Philadelphia experimented with this