Accounts of people confined alone in dungeons or towers abound in stories dating back to ancient times. But solitary confinement as a self-conscious, organized, and widespread prison practice originated in the United States, and was born soon after the nation itself.
In 1790, the Walnut Street Jail, named for the Philadelphia street on which it stood, was expanded to hold the growing prison population of a burgeoning city. The expansion included the addition of a new kind of cellblock where sixteen individuals were held in single cells, built in such a way as to prevent communication with one another. The individuals held in these cells were not put to work, but were left alone in their cells to contemplate their crimes and, if all went as planned, become “penitent”—thus the name of the new block, Penitentiary House.
This innovation took place under the influence of a group calling itself the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, which met for the first time in 1787 at the home of Benjamin Franklin. The Society was populated largely by Quakers, who believed in punishment for crimes, but also believed that all human beings were capable of redemption. They saw the new regime offered at Penitentiary House as a kinder and more effective alternative to more viscerally cruel punishments such as flogging, the public humiliations of the pillory and stocks, and the misery of filthy, violent, overcrowded jails.
Michel Foucault argues that the desire to treat those convicted of criminal offenses more “humanely” was rooted not only in Enlightenment ideas but also in the shifting power structures brought on by political and industrial revolutions. Early prison reforms served a pragmatic as well as a moral purpose, replacing the arbitrary and violent punishments of sovereigns with a more controlled and technocratic system of punishments befitting public power.
The new approach spread quickly. At Auburn Prison in upstate New York in 1821, eighty people were placed in solitary confinement in a new wing. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, in their 1833 treatise on U.S. penitentiaries, described the result:
In order to reform them, [the convicts] had been submitted to complete isolation; but this absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills.
The unfortunates on whom this experiment was made fell into a state of depression so manifest that their keepers were struck with it; their lives seemed in danger if they remained longer in this situation; five of them had already succumbed during a single year; their moral state was not less alarming; one of them had become insane; another, in a fit of despair, had embraced the opportunity, when the keeper brought him something, to precipitate himself from his cell, running the almost certain chance of a mortal fall.