Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia is where, in John Kiriakou’s account, solitary confinement was invented. He treats the fact as the one most Americans do not know: “the concept of solitary confinement as a punishment was actually created in the United States… it was invented in 1829 at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”[1]
The building still stands, in ruins, and can be toured. Its prisoners included Al Capone.[2]
The design
Kiriakou describes the architecture as inseparable from the theory. American politicians built “this enormous, imposing, neo-Gothic, escape-proof maximum security penitentiary made of stone.” The cells were tiny; the guards sat at the centre, with the cells radiating outward “like spokes of a wheel.”[2][3]
Each cell was to contain nothing but a bed, a chair, a small table, a chamber pot and a Bible — “the idea being that if a prisoner has nothing to do all day long but eat and sleep and read the Bible, he will come out of prison at the end of his sentence as a good law-abiding Christian man.”[3]
What happened instead
“And what they found was that instead everybody went insane. And that’s where we first learned of these severe psychological effects that solitary confinement has” — anxiety, depression, paranoia, hallucinations, suicidal thoughts and suicidal actions.[4][5]
The observation Kiriakou draws from the date is about persistence rather than discovery: “we’ve known this for 200 years, and we’re still using it.”[5]
Why it was kept
Asked directly why the practice survived the discovery that it did not rehabilitate anyone, Kiriakou’s answer separates the two purposes. “They decided that it was still effective as a form of punishment. Maybe the rehabilitation part didn’t work, but by God, nobody wanted to be in solitary, and so that was a good punishment.”[6]
Asked whether it has worked as a deterrent, his answer is two words: “Absolutely not.” And his summary of what remains: “It’s just cruel, that’s all.”[7]
The chronology he points at is the one the interviewer supplies and he accepts — that James Madison, who wrote the constitution meant to distinguish the country from the tyrannies of Europe, died in 1836, seven years after the penitentiary opened.[8]