Rush had the wheelbarrow men foremost in mind at Franklin’ s home that winter evening. Historian David Freeman Hawke even suggests that an encounter with wheelbarrow men fostered Rush’ s interest in reform of the justice system. He’ d seen a group of them sweeping his street and offered them something to drink. While talking to them, he found that, as Hawke notes,“ he had sympathy, perhaps even respect, for the way they bore their humiliation.” Rush insisted to his audience that
All public punishments tend to make bad men worse, and to increase crimes by their influence upon society. … But may not the benefit derived to society, by employing criminals to repair public roads, or to clean streets, overbalance the evils that have been mentioned? I answer, by no means. On the contrary … the practice of employing criminals in public labour, will render labour of every kind disreputable.
The spectacle trivialized both criminal and onlooker, he argued, and tended to“ make bad men worse,” especially by destroying any sense of shame. It was no better than the blood punishments, which also failed to create a true change of mind and habit:“ A man who has lost his character at a whipping-post, has nothing valuable left to lose in society.” Such measures, Rush insisted, also harmed those who witnessed them:
The men, or perhaps the women whose persons we detest, possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations. They are bone of their bone; and were originally fashioned with the same spirits. What, then, must be the consequence of a familiarity with such objects of horror, upon our attachments and duties to our friends and connections, or to the rest of mankind?
In addition to decrying traditional methods of punishment, Rush offered specific proposals for a penitentiary in which silence would be put toward many ends— ideas that were inextricable from the city’ s Quaker roots. Silence in Philadelphia held a profound and specific meaning that harked back to its first days as a settlement. In the spare simple spaces of the meeting houses, Quakers gathered and waited and listened together for the presence of the divine, for a voice that could only be heard in passive, expectant, and profound silence:“ By not speaking, not desiring, and not thinking, one arrives at the true and perfect mystical silence, wherein God speaks with the soul,” explained seventeenth-century Italian priest and Quaker inspiration Miguel de Molinos.
Not only did silence have a particular meaning in Pennsylvania; justice did as well. William Penn, in his new colony, was concerned with fostering a humane and fair means of dealing with transgression, a belief born of experience. As a convert to Quakerism, he’ d had hard experience with both the jails and courtrooms of London. Since the religion’ s founding by George Fox in the 1640s, Quakers have been subject to persecution. In the late 17th century, after Charles II passed a set of acts that attempted to weaken dissent and protect the Church of England, besides being stocked, stoned, and whipped, more than 13,000 Quakers were imprisoned in England. Hundreds died while incarcerated.
Penn’ s Great Law— a series of statutes by which the Colony was to be governed— aimed to ensure the procedures for trial and sentencing in the Pennsylvania colony would be simple, understandable, and equitable. Although the blood punishments didn’ t disappear, they were fewer and milder than those in England and the other colonies. The death sentence was abolished for all crimes except premeditated murder, which was in accord with predominant Quaker thinking on capital punishment. In Penn’ s colony, every county prison was to be a workhouse, and felons were either to be fined or sentenced to a certain amount of time at hard labor in a“ house of Correction.”
Still, Penn’ s laws, though less severe, were based on traditional means of carrying out justice. What Rush proposed was innovative, and in the years following his speech, he more fully articulated specific ideas for the penitentiary. While he emphasized the possibilities of reformation, the horror of confinement was an inextricable component of his vision. The secrecy and sense of the extreme fostered by an isolated location and an austere aura of gloom would work to magnify the wages of such punishment in the public mind. For the prisoner, those same qualities would work to make society feel dear once again.“ An attachment to kindred and society is one of the strongest feelings of the human heart,” insisted Rush.“ A separation from them, therefore, has ever been considered as one of severest punishments that can be inflicted upon man. … Personal liberty is so dear to all men, that the loss of it, for an indefinite time, is a punishment so severe that death has often been preferred to it.” To counter the dread of an indefinite sentence— commonly endured by debtors and felons awaiting punishment in the jails of the time— Rush advocated terms of specific duration. And he held firm to the notion that silence in solitude would inevitably be redemptive:“ I already hear the inhabitants of our villages and townships counting the years that shall complete the reformation of one of their citizens,” he proclaimed.“ I behold them running to meet him on the day of his deliverance. His friends and family bathe his cheeks with tears of joy; and the universal shout of the neighborhood is,‘ This our brother was lost, and is found— was dead and is alive.’”
There had been, prior to the construction of the penitentiary, some partial measures toward reform through solitude and silence in Philadelphia. In 1790, the Pennsylvania Legislature, looking for ways to alleviate the crowding in jails, approved funding to remodel the city’ s Walnut Street Jail. When opened in 1773, as was typical at the time, the general prison population was housed together in large rooms, debtors and felons alike fending for themselves. Under the remodeling plan— advocated by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, of which Rush was a founding and influential member— in addition to other changes, a separate
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