Mass incarceration

The American Prison Experiment: A 250-Year History of Good Intentions and Bad Results

A strange trip through the U.S. prison system's never-ending cycle of failure and reform

C.J. Ciaramella | From the October 2026 issue

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(Photo: Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Jeremy Graham/Alamy)

Reason's October 2026 cover story is an expansive exploration of prison reform in America:

Last December, on a bitterly cold afternoon, I stood inside the walled yard of Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary while I waited for a museum docent to start a tour. I stamped my feet and blew on my hands to keep warm, much like I imagined tourists and incarcerated men did there two centuries ago.

Eastern State Penitentiary is one of the places where the American prison experiment began, and where one of its most bizarre iterations was tested on human beings. After it opened in 1829, Eastern State was, as it is now, a tourist attraction. In 1858, more than 10,000 visitors paid entry fees to gawk at the building and the men confined inside it.

The walls are what everyone sees first when they come to Eastern State. The prison, located on a rise in what is now Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood, is skirted by imposing 30-foot-high granite walls, crenelated turrets, and a medieval gatehouse. It was designed to intimidate, and it has always done its job.

When the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American and French revolutions, passed through Philadelphia on an 1824 tour of all 24 U.S. states, city leaders showed him the facade of Eastern State, then still under construction. According to all accounts, Lafayette recoiled at the sight. Thomas B. McElwee wrote in an 1835 history of the prison that the "form of the edifice was disapproved by LaFayette, in the memorable expression which he uttered as he crossed its threshold for the first time, 'What! Have you Bastilles in this country?'"

Eastern State cost $780,000 to construct, making it one of the most expensive buildings in the country when it opened and one of the most expensive in the world. The paradox of the place was that this fearsome fortress represented the liberal ideals of the young American republic and an investment in building a more humane justice system.

"Prisons were really supposed to be these republican machines," says Ashley T. Rubin, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and author of The Deviant Prison, a history of Eastern State Penitentiary. "Crime was one of the main ways that you could basically corrupt the nation, because virtue was essential to what it meant to be a good republican, and criminals are by definition not virtuous, so we had to make them into virtuous citizens."

What drew visiting dignitaries, Enlightenment intellectuals, and everyday lookie-loos to Eastern State after it opened—and what still draws tourists today—was the unprecedented experiment to produce virtuous citizens behind its walls.

It's an experiment that continues, in fits and starts, today.

Last year President Donald Trump announced to the surprise of everyone that Alcatraz prison would be reopened. "The reopening of ALCATRAZ will serve as a symbol of Law, Order, and JUSTICE," the president posted on social media.

The news was unexpected, not just because the island prison is currently under National Park Service management and has been rusting to pieces in the salt air of San Francisco Bay for decades, but because the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has been in a yearslong decline and can barely staff its existing prisons. The BOP has almost 6,000 fewer staff than its target number, and many of its facilities are, if not as decrepit as Alcatraz, in need of serious repairs.

Nevertheless, the White House requested $152 million from Congress this April to reopen Alcatraz. Whether or not it ever reopens, the efforts are notable because Trump is claiming a national ideology of punishment, symbolized by the notoriously harsh prison. "When we were a more serious Nation, in times past," Trump wrote, "we did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals, and keep them far away from anyone they could harm."

Trump was espousing a particular theory of prisons, one that emphasized pain and punishment. It's a popular notion. It also happens to be wrong.

The modern prison is widely considered an American invention, one born out of a peculiar American mix of Christian theology and Enlightenment confidence. Much as the Founding Fathers sought to constrain the passions of majorities and lawmakers through checks and balances, prison advocates in the early republic wanted to use architecture and discipline to mold convicts into productive citizens while avoiding the sadism and spectacle that typified criminal justice in Europe.

Despite those best intentions, our prisons have been the sites of unremitting horrors for 250 years and counting. Administrative whippings and outright torture—such as electrocuting inmates with jerry-rigged crank telephones—persisted until the end of the 1960s. After judges and state oversight boards got too nosy, the punishments moved off the books.

Today multiple state prison systems are in states of crisis as bad as or worse than the BOP. The Justice Department sued the state of Alabama in 2020 over its failure to protect incarcerated people from rampant violence and sexual assault. Despite that, shocking levels of corruption and death have persisted, verging into the macabre. In 2024, multiple families of deceased inmates filed lawsuits alleging that the University of Alabama at Birmingham had, without consent, retained their loved ones' organs after autopsies for student research. In 2022, a federal judge ruled that Arizona prison officials were deliberately indifferent to appalling and sometimes fatal medical neglect, including a case where a woman's multiple sclerosis was left untreated until she was nearly completely paralyzed by age 36. "No legitimate humane system would operate in this manner," Judge Roslyn O. Silver of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona concluded.

Yet this is the system that prevails in much of the United States. It has endured since the country's founding, despite reliable 40- to 50-year cycles of reform. The prison is a problem our republic has never solved in any of its various modes: the Jacksonian Era, the Progressive Era, the wave of prison building in the 1980s that launched the age of mass incarceration, or the attempts over the last decade to roll back mass incarceration's excesses.

After 250 years of the American prison experiment, we need to ask why we've never been able to maintain prison systems compatible with our Constitution or our national ideals. While American prisons were initially designed as reactions to the savagery of European criminal codes, it might be time to examine how some European countries' rehabilitative models could provide the foundations for the next historic American innovation in criminal justice.

To understand this system, and grapple with both its moral failures and its hold on American society, I traveled to the places where it was born and where it has evolved. I saw solitary confinement cells where people were left to find God or madness, watched incarcerated men ride wild bulls at a rodeo inside a state penitentiary, and talked to a man who saw the best and worst of what's possible in prison before his life sentence for murder was overturned.

What I found was a country that can't decide what it wants its prisons to be: civic engines for rehabilitation and character formation, or state warehouses for relentless and remorseless dehumanization. The question of what criminal punishment should look like is one of the longest-running and most significant debates over what America itself stands for.

BOOK ONE: PROTO-PRISONS AND THE JACKSONIAN ERA (1790–1870)

The American prison experiment has often proceeded as a series of calls and responses, each era a backlash to what came before. The first penitentiaries of the Jacksonian Era were a reaction to the chaotic jails of the 18th century and to fears of social disorder. As such, the architects of these first prisons tried to create environments of systematic, unyielding discipline to mold convicts into productive citizens. They were essentially creating the field of penology on the fly, and the results were both groundbreaking and frequently tragic.

The grand theories and systems of the first wave of U.S. prison building would all fall into disrepute by the end of the 19th century. But they provided a template—and a belief in the human capacity for redemption—that influences American corrections to this day.

A Place for Moral Instruction

Unlike in the jails of the 18th century, everything in Eastern State was designed for the purpose of corrections. The prison was built around a central hub, from which cellblocks extended radially like spokes on a wagon wheel. Newly arriving prisoners were brought in wearing hoods, given identification numbers that replaced their names while they were incarcerated, and put in isolation cells where they spent 23 hours a day. Inside each cell were a bed and a worktable, where inmates spent daytime hours at trades such as making shoes.

The thing former Eastern State inmates most often recalled was the profound, tomblike silence. Prisoners were never allowed to talk to each other. The barrel-vaulted ceilings were designed to amplify sound, so from the central hub a guard could hear the faintest whisper or languid sigh. To maintain the atmosphere, guards padded through the cellblocks in wool socks.

The only human contact the incarcerated people of Eastern State Penitentiary were allowed was a weekly meeting, through a grated door, with local ministers. The ministers acted as "moral instructors" and kept notes on the prisoners' prospects for rehabilitation.

The philosophical cornerstone of Eastern State was laid in 1787 at Benjamin Franklin's house, when the humanitarian Benjamin Rush first proposed building a "house of repentance" for convicts. Rush wrote that inmates should be subjected to strict routines of "BODILY PAIN, LABOR, WATCHFULNESS, SOLITUDE, and SILENCE," joined with "CLEANLINESS and a SIMPLE DIET."

Although the modern prison or penitentiary is often considered an American invention, contemporary workhouses and prisons in Europe provided the template. When the influential English jail reformer John Howard toured Europe in 1775–76 for research, he visited the Ospizio di San Michelein Rome—an orphanage and hospice run by the Catholic Church that also included prison wings for licentious women and juvenile delinquents. Boys were held in isolation cells at night and worked silently in a common room during the day, beneath a sign that read: "Silentium." Also inscribed in the workroom was a Latin motto that translates to "It is of little advantage to restrain the Bad by Punishment unless you render them Good by Discipline."

This was the purest expression of reformers' belief that punishment must include rehabilitation through work, moral instruction, and social hygiene. By applying the correct dosages of each, Michael Ignatieff wrote in A Just Measure of Pain, the penitentiary promised "a technology of salvation." Likewise, W. Fitzhugh Brundage writes in Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition that Rush "inspired like-minded reformers to envision penitentiaries as the young republic's humanitarian temples."

It was to be an elegant dovetailing of state and church priorities—if it worked. When the Pennsylvania Legislature approved plans for the construction of Eastern State in 1821, the U.S. criminal justice system felt, as it does now, like it was teetering on the verge of failure.

Since the American Revolution, the nascent states had been working to reform their jails—usually nothing more than a filthy common room that held men, women, and minors together—and rewrite their laws to sever themselves from England's despised criminal code, which by the end of the 18th century included more than 200 capital offenses. The reform movement was propelled by anti-royal sentiments, by the spread of Howard's theories among the elite, and by theological objections to capital and corporal punishment—particularly in Pennsylvania, with its high number of Quakers. "As the sect with the strictest definition of what was due Caesar, [Quakers] were in perennial conflict with Caesar's laws," Ignatieff writes. "Hence of all sects they asked the most searching questions about the right of the state to coerce citizens."

The problem with getting rid of the whipping post and stocks was figuring out their replacement. In 1786, Pennsylvania briefly tried sentencing criminal offenders to public labor repairing roads and digging ditches, but it discovered that leaving gangs of convicts to wander freely through the streets was a poor idea. The laborers, who became derisively known as "wheelbarrowmen," wore degrading uniforms and were mocked by onlookers. There were also escapes, violence, and, in one incident, an attempt to rob Alexander Hamilton's carriage as it returned from the Constitutional Convention. Public opinion quickly turned against what one Philadelphia Evening Post columnist called the "lawless and wandering banditti of wheelbarrowmen."

Rush argued convincingly that public punishment degraded both the convict and the society that witnessed it. In 1790, Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail opened a wing of 16 isolation cells based on Rush's ideas. It was initially touted as a success and copied in many other U.S. cities, but within several years these "proto-prisons," as Rubin calls them, fell prey to the same overcrowding, riots, and arsons that they had supposedly cured. By 1810, the newfangled "penitentiary house" that had made Philadelphia a worldwide leader in criminal justice reform was widely seen as a failure, too small and poorly designed for its requirements. State authorities had to call up militias to quell prison riots and mass breakouts in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

"American states' first sustained experiments with long-term confinement as punishment for convicted offenders, drawing on Pennsylvania's example, had failed—visibly and spectacularly," Rubin writes.

In response to the failure of the proto-prisons and a rising fear of social disorder, there were proposals to abolish the penitentiary mode of punishment and return to hard labor, corporal punishment, and even banishment. In his 1818 address to the New York Legislature, Gov. DeWitt Clinton called incarceration a "failure" that enrolled criminals in a "school of turpitude." Several states reauthorized capital punishments they had stricken from their books.

But reformers convinced state legislatures that what was needed were networks of larger penitentiaries located outside of major cities. This launched the first wave of American prison building. Overcrowding at New York's first state prison, Newgate, led to construction of Auburn prison in 1816. Pennsylvania lawmakers approved the construction of Western State Penitentiary, based on Jeremy Bentham's panopticon, near Pittsburgh in 1818, followed by plans for Eastern State in 1821.

"There were a couple of moments where we almost got rid of the prison," Rubin says, "where people were like, 'This isn't working.' But the majority response was, 'Let's stick with incarceration. This is a good republican punishment, not a monarchical punishment.'"

There were strong doubts, though, even among some of the staunchest supporters of penal reform. When Lafayette blurted out his unflattering first impression of Eastern State, he was in a delicate position not just diplomatically but ideologically. He and many other European liberals wanted to tout the success of Pennsylvania's legal and penal reforms and were anxious about calls for their repeal. But Lafayette had also spent five years imprisoned in Prussian and Austrian dungeons, one in complete isolation following a failed escape attempt. ("The change in his looks was frightening," one of Lafayette's daughters wrote of their 1795 reunion in prison.)

Although Lafayette's exact words to Philadelphia's dignitaries were not recorded, his secretary, Auguste Levasseur, wrote: "The frankness and conviction of the general, overcame his repugnance, and with all the regard and respect which were due, and which his personal situation rendered still more necessary, he represented to them that solitary confinement was a punishment which should be experienced to be rightly appreciated."

It was a lesson that another prison had already learned the hard way.

'A Silent and Insulated Working Machine'

On Christmas Day 1821, 80 inmates at New York's Auburn prison were moved into a newly constructed wing of isolation cells as an experiment. The cells were only 4 feet wide and had nothing in them but a bed and a Bible. The results were later described by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, who toured the prison in 1831.

"This trial, from which so happy a result had been anticipated, was fatal to the greater part of the convicts," the two reported. "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."

Another inmate "beat and mangled his head against the walls of his cell until he destroyed one of his eyes," wrote Auburn superintendent Gershom Powers. Auburn shut down the isolation wing in 1823. The New York governor pardoned roughly two dozen atrophied and mentally scarred survivors, and the rest were moved back into the general population. Twelve of those released recidivated within a few years, one committing a burglary the night he was let out.

Tocqueville and Beaumont's conclusion on endless solitary confinement was unsparing. "This absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man," they wrote. "It destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills."

Out of the failure of perpetual isolation, Auburn instead developed what became known as the silent system—or the Auburn system. Warden Elam Lynds said his goal was to create an environment that broke convicts' spirits and reduced them to "a silent and insulated working machine."

The Auburn system created the iconic image of the American prisoner in a white-and-black-striped uniform. Inmates worked in common rooms at factory-style jobs during the day and were returned to single cells at night. They marched in lockstep from room to room and were not allowed to speak to each other while working, eating, or marching. Nor were they allowed to "sing, dance, whistle, run, jump, or do anything which will have the least tendency to disturb or alarm the prison," Powers wrote (emphasis in original). A "standing rule" also forced inmates to always stand in their cells unless ordered to sleep.

The Auburn and Pennsylvania systems became the two dominant penal theories of the first wave of Jacksonian Era prison building, and there were fierce debates and pamphleteering wars between the two camps. (Americans have never been able to resist a duopoly.) One of the most remarkable things about the era was the intense public discourse about what the means and ends of criminal justice should be. "In the starkest terms, antebellum Americans confronted the challenge of calibrating penal punishments and distinguishing legitimate punishments, consonant with American legal and constitutional principles, from forms of cruelty and torture," Brundage writes in Civilizing Torture.

Everyone had an opinion on the subject. For example, James Madison wrote in an 1828 letter that "On the questions incident to solitary confinement, the facts and reflections are peculiarly interesting. They amount to a very strong proof that it is inadmissible, in the constancy and inoccupancy which have been supposed to constitute its aptitude for its contemplated purpose."

While supporters of the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems were busy casting aspersions on each other, both models ran into early problems with discipline. Torture was no longer an acceptable criminal penalty, but when some inmates failed to respond as expected to the salutary effects of silent reflection and labor, states authorized corporal punishments as administrative discipline.

The New York Legislature legalized whippings as prison punishments in 1819. Six years later, a pregnant woman was flogged in Auburn, even though women were exempted from the law. She died six weeks later after giving birth. New York lawmakers repealed the measure in 1847 after a mentally ill man was whipped to death, receiving at least 300 lashes.

Eastern State administrators prided themselves on not whipping inmates, but the differences between the two systems were sometimes superficial. In 1833, a mere four years after Eastern State opened, the Pennsylvania Legislature launched an investigation into practices at the prison after an inmate died from being gagged with a torture device. Testimony revealed that guards employed a variety of brutal disciplinary measures. Brundage writes in Civilizing Torture that these methods included "being drenched with freezing water outside during winter months, getting strapped into chairs with tight leather restraints and beaten for days on end, being put into a pit called 'The Hole' where they had scant food and no light or human........

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