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Sentencing Law and Policy
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Distinct headlines with distinct stories on modern intersections between Bible and jail

By Douglas Berman

BH03The picture reprinted here is an overhead view of the historic Eastern State Penitentiary, and here below are a few passages from a lengthy discussion of the famed prison’s early history:

Eastern State Penitentiary broke sharply with the prisons of its day, abandoning corporal punishment and ill treatment. This massive new structure, opened in 1829, became one of the most expensive American buildings of its day and soon the most famous prison in the world.  The Penitentiary would not simply punish, but move the criminal toward spiritual reflection and change….

Eastern’s seven earliest cellblocks may represent the first modern building in the United States.  The concept plan, by the British-born architect John Haviland, reveals the purity of the vision.  Seven cellblocks radiate from a central surveillance rotunda.  Haviland’s ambitious mechanical innovations placed each prisoner in his or her own private cell, centrally heated, with running water, a flush toilet, and a skylight.  Adjacent to the cell was a private outdoor exercise yard contained by a ten-foot wall.  This was in an age when the White House, with its new occupant Andrew Jackson, had no running water and was heated with coal-burning stoves.

In the vaulted, skylit cell, the prisoner had only the light from heaven, the word of God (the Bible) and honest work (shoemaking, weaving, and the like) to lead to penitence.  In striking contrast to the Gothic exterior, Haviland used the grand architectural vocabulary of churches on the interior.  He employed 30-foot, barrel vaulted hallways, tall arched windows, and skylights throughout.  He wrote of the Penitentiary as a forced monastery, a machine for reform.

The historic and intricate links between incarceration, religious commitments and the Bible are on my mind today because of these two very different recent stories reporting on two very different modern intersections of Bible study and imprisonment: