Eastern State Draft

Eastern State may have been founded on a good idea- not writing prisoners off as worthless unchangeable criminals but trying to help them be better people- but the methods did not work and were inhumane. The idea of reforming prisoners rather than just looking them up was revolutionary and enlightening, even though it tended not to work in the practices Eastern State used. ESP was a place that stripped people of what made them human, and prevented people from performing acts that keep people sane. It could almost be seen as a method of torture, where instead of helping people as the founders had hoped, it took away every liberty a person has.

The original design of Eastern state forced people to really look into themselves and their actions, alone in a cell with nothing to do but explore your own mind allows a person to form a new perspective on themself. 5 years of no contact with the outside world, apart from that obnoxious preacher and the occasional guard. Constant, unending boredom, or the constant threat of discovery and punishments if attempts to alleviate that boredom were discovered. Eastern State is truly unlike the other prisons today, prisoners must face perhaps the strongest punishment of our time, solitude. Eastern State was a lonely, maddeningly quiet and boring cell, and unproductive waste of his time. The solitary confinement was not going to make him a better person, it would just drive him mad. He had to be uncooperative to give himself something to do.

Eastern state penitentiary was for the most part a failure: prisoners found ways to communicate and rebel, and often played or refused the help of their reformers. Eastern state failed, an idea too good to come true. The isolation attempts failed, the doctrines were rejected, and there’s no way to know if people repented. ESP was a waste of space that isn’t effective in its penitentiary methods to make me reflect on my wrongdoings. The prison was a site of mental torture, inconceivably harsh to anyone who had not seen it with his own eyes.

From the outside, one thinks this fortress is strict and organized and is reforming thousands of prisoners. From the inside, the prison is falling apart. Things are no longer so organized and officials are doing what they can to keep prisoners under control. No reform is occurring. The penitentiary is a record of past horrors, but one whose ghosts have long since fled.