The IMU is Pennsylvania’s latest venture into long-term solitary confinement — what Pelzer calls “the hole within the hole.”
“It is torture of the mind,” Pelzer said. “It’s a zoo of humans. Even animals could see where the sun or moon is at; our windows are covered.”
Stand back far enough to take in the sweep of history, though, and the IMU can be viewed as just one more iteration of a centuries-old tradition. It traces its lineage back 232 years and 35 miles to Philadelphia — a city that’s touted as the cradle of liberty.
That origin story starts at the Walnut Street prison, an often overlooked Philadelphia first, situated just a block south of Independence Hall. It became the first state penitentiary in 1790, with the first dedicated solitary cells. And it became a prototype for the nation: an incubator of American innovations in solitary confinement, incarceration-as-punishment, and even early attempts at criminal justice reform.
The story that begins in that prison at Sixth and Walnut is a history of social control in America — one contaminated by racism at the outset.
It was pitched as a humane, Quaker alternative to public humiliations and corporal punishment. Yet, some historians view the pioneering prison as a direct reaction to the 1780 Abolition Act, which gradually ended slavery in Pennsylvania.
From the start, the prison’s population was disproportionately Black. It set the tone for two centuries of American carceral expansion that evolved, explicitly or implicitly, to contain advances in Black freedom.
In the subsequent decades, as the free Black population in Philadelphia and other Northern cities grew rapidly, many of those cities adopted the penitentiary model, alongside the creation of professional police forces designed to quell rampant urban crime and disorder.
In 1865, on the heels of Emancipation, came the 13th Amendment, eliminating slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” By then, state penitentiaries had conscripted more than 19,000 people into prison labor, a majority of them in the North. The Southern states developed convict-leasing arrangements to mines, mills, farms, and brickyards. They wrote “Black codes” that criminalized “vagrancy” and other behavior by Black people — effectively replacing slavery with a new form of racial oppression.
A century later, as the civil rights movement swept through American cities, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched a counterinsurgency plan: the War on Crime. That unprecedented investment in the policing of Black communities helped launch a mass incarceration era that would sweep Black people into prison at five times the rate of whites. The effect was profound in Philadelphia, historian Elizabeth Hinton found, where the jails went from 50% Black to 95% between 1970 and 1974, coinciding with Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo’s rise to mayor.