This Short-Lived Penitentiary Was The Blueprint For Today's Prisons

Drawing of Walnut Street Philadelphia
Zain Murdock
July 9, 2021

In 1773, Walnut Street Jail was born. The other jail in town was overcrowded and decrepit, with people constantly breaking out into fights. So the Philadelphia Quakers built a new building. 

They had something brand new up their sleeves. But would it work?

As the first prison “penitentiary,” they created a cell-block where people would sit alone and reflect about what they’d done. Today, this is called “solitary confinement” and is widely recognized as a form of torture.

But it got even worse.

The goal was to free prisoners from forced labor and give them time to rehabilitate. But once slavery started phasing out, that all changed. 

The disproportionate incarceration of Black people went into full swing. Pennsylvania’s Black population grew by 52.9% in 10 years, but its Black prison population increased by 113.8%!

Consistently accused of poverty-related “crimes against property” like survival theft, “freedom” clearly wasn’t enough for the formerly enslaved to survive. So Walnut Street Prison filled up, becoming just as crowded and disgusting as the other jails. 

It closed only a couple decades later.

What the Quakers imagined a “penitentiary” to be is clearly NOT what it is now. It's not a "time-out" corner – it's now a whole industry that unequally targets and tortures Black people. It's time for us to let go of what cannot serve us.

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