There, for one hour a day, he could look up at a patch of sky. Williams wouldn’ t be able to receive or write letters. Although he might exchange occasional words with a guard or inspector, and he’ d have regular visits from moral and spiritual instructors, no friends or family would be allowed to visit him. He was not to talk unless instructed to. He was not to make any unnecessary noise. The guards patrolling the hallways wore socks over their boots to muffle their footsteps. A prisoner would never know when a guard was approaching the peephole in his door, and so always had to expect he was being watched. Likewise, the wheels of the meal cart were fashioned of wool, which caused no perceptual sound when rations were delivered. The food was meant to be plentiful and nourishing: coffee or cocoa in the morning, one pound of bread a day, potatoes and meat at noon, a type of corn pudding called“ Indian mush” in the evening. Each prisoner was granted half a gallon of molasses per month and could ask for salt. He’ d be given vinegar as a favor.( When Eastern State opened, the poorest city dwellers lived in lightless basements, and officials feared that the eightby-twelve-foot cell and the guarantee of three meals a day might prove attractive.)
In today’ s isolation, the food is not only often meager but unappetizing, with few fresh fruits and vegetables, and bread that is often soggy, sometimes moldy. The noise is unceasing. Random cries and howls. Screams. Rattling. Banging. Shouting. Buzzers and alarms. At Eastern State, prisoners resorted to furtive tappings and notes passed over the walls of their exercise yards to communicate with one another. Now there is fishing— a means of passing a note to an adjoining cell by attaching it to a weighted string and slipping it underneath the cell door. The shadows in a cell lit only by a small round window are gone. In keeping with modern times, an excess of harsh artificial light floods solitary cells. Sometimes it isn’ t even shut off at night.
Still, an inmate who has spent time in 21st-century isolation would recognize the dimensions of Charles Williams’ cell, and its toilet, sink, and narrow bed against the wall. And its lack of privacy. A modern inmate may be continually monitored by video feed, which only increases the feeling expressed hundreds of years ago by the Marquis de Lafayette upon seeing Eastern State for the first time:“ none have exceeded— none have equaled that single oppression of being … exposed to the view of two eyes, watching my every motion, taking from my very thoughts every idea of privacy.” Although those in modern-day isolation don’ t work, anyone who knows about surviving carceral isolation would certainly understand why some prisoners in Eastern State voluntarily rose before daybreak and began to hammer their leather. As prisoners’ rights advocate and writer Keramet Reiter observes, the inmates who do best in solitary“ develop rigid, repetitive routines to get through the long days.” Exercise, preparing legal documents, reading, learning a language.
And they would understand just how unprepared Charles
Williams must have been for the world he was released into exactly two years to the day after he’ d been ushered to his cell. His original clothes had been returned to him, as had his name. He had gained some skills as a shoemaker, and prison officials had given him four dollars,“ whereby the temptation immediately to commit offenses against society, before employment can be obtained, may be obviated,” but such things would be of limited help in a world that had surely grown strange to him. It’ s not likely Williams would have had any word from his family during his confinement. No gossip or news from the outside. He’ d know nothing of the inventions or cholera outbreaks or prominent deaths of the past two years. And it’ s doubtful that anyone was running to meet him on the day of his deliverance.
Upon his release in October 1831, Eastern State Penitentiary was still not completed, and was not yet full, although it soon became clear that the original plan for seven ranges of cells housing three hundred prisoners was not large enough for the future, so John Haviland revised his design to include more ranges. He added a second story to some of them. Once Eastern State was finally finished in 1836, it could house 586 prisoners in individual cells. Even so, within a few decades, Rush’ s concept of redemption through silence and solitude was lost to the exigencies of a system contending with exponential growth and social change. After the Civil War, the demand for space outgrew the complex’ s capacity, and the warden had no choice but to double up prisoners in the cells. By the last decade of the century, half of the prisoners had cellmates, and there were communal workshops on the grounds. During the 20th century, a prison newspaper, baseball teams, boxing matches.
Eastern State housed its last prisoners in 1971. By then, the city of Philadelphia had long grown around its walls of Schuylkill stone. Today, the penitentiary remains in a state of preserved ruin. Visitors can peer into mockups of the cells as they were in Charles Williams’ time. They can also descend beneath one of the ranges to view four solitary cells constructed in the 1920s— by then Eastern State had become a fully congregate prison— for the purpose of punishment within punishment. They had been carved out of an underground tunnel. No beds. No workbench. No plumbing. No windows. What electric light there was would have been controlled by the guards. In their ruin, those four cells now stand for all that became of Rush’ s hope for a system to replace the barbarity of the ages.
Jane Brox is the author of five award-winning non-fiction books.
This article was originally published as“ The Silent Treatment: Solitary Confinement’ s Unlikely Origins” on The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it, please see: https:// publicdomainreview. org / reusing-material /. It was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.
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