Liberty's Prisoners. Jen Manion
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Officials hoped that by sparing the public the financial burden of supporting prisoners, they would be free to experiment with new forms of punishment. McKean supported penal reform generally and public labor in particular because it had a revenue-generating scheme that would finance the expansion of the prison.20
Visibly humiliating labor provided a new twist on the old practice of public shaming. The practice of public shaming was used by many colonies with impunity, subjecting women and men to the stock, pillory, branding, and public carting.21 Pennsylvania Quakers, however, were less violent than New England Puritans or those in the culture of violence that characterized the slaveholding southern colonies. The fact that they shied away from forms of corporal punishment widely used by other colonies and championed in the mother country has been attributed to their aversion to “unusual cruelty, suffering and the shedding of blood.”22 Quakers generally resorted to fines over corporal punishment, making this reinvigorated call for shame in punishment curious. But rather than reflect the public shaming of old, punishment by public labor was a forward-looking response to the breakdown in social hierarchy and deference that propelled the revolution. The combination of hard work and public shame was the perfect tool—timely and necessary—for reasserting not just law and order, but hierarchy.23
The reform aspect of public punishment hinged on prisoners having certain emotional reactions to their experience. It was essential that those subjected to it embrace a feeling of disgrace. The law itself stated that labor was to be “publicly and disgracefully imposed” while the dress of prisoners was to be “formed with every mark of disgrace.”24 Outfits marked with bold, unattractive stripes made from the coarsest of fabrics were one component. The iron collar around one’s neck, attached by a chain to a heavy metal ball, was certainly a mark of degradation. On top of all that, convicts were to be “disgracefully treated” in every imaginable way. Reformers believed that deep personal shame was a key ingredient in motivating people to try to change their ways.25 But creating conditions to incite a feeling of disgrace was easier said than done. Two seemingly competing forces made public punishment short-lived and untenable: the sentimental project of elites and the rejection of both authority and reform by those condemned.
First, consider the actions of the men. The men sentenced to public punishment became known as “wheelbarrow men” because they pushed wheelbarrows through the streets. They embraced this collective identity imposed on them and redirected it for their own aims.26 Wheelbarrow men themselves refused to embody and express the feelings reformers desired or predicted. Convicts did not defer to authority, bury their heads in shame, or succumb under the weight of guilt and remorse. Rather, they maintained their own agendas. They embraced the opportunity to get out of the prison, talk to each other freely, and interact with the public. They taunted people walking by as they cleaned the streets. They begged for money. They were not diminished or disgraced by public punishment.
Rather, they were emboldened. A group of wheelbarrow men plotted a great escape from the prison. The plot was “previously laid,” since they had a coordinated strategy of “calling attention of the keepers to the main gate” while others climbed the walls of the yard. Mostly armed with knives and stones, a group of “about eighty” nearly succeeded in breaking through an iron gate before an assistant keeper “fired several shot at them.” When all was said and done, one was killed and seven were wounded.27 They threatened people with violence, including the city’s squire. Some claimed that if they got their hands on the squire, Mr. Pollard, “They would cut his hair off and disfigure him so that he should not be known.”28 In September 1787, several escaped by “getting into the common sewer” and were only captured “after a long and vigilant subterraneous pursuit.”29 The largest escape occurred in 1788, when a group of thirty-three prisoners fled the grounds, few of whom were eventually recaptured. Some attribute an “unusual number of highway robberies and burglaries” later that year to this bunch, and this was widely thought a result of the wheelbarrow law.30 Wheelbarrow men from Philadelphia routinely escaped. In the summer of 1788, four men were picked up in Baltimore as vagrants who were described as “wheelbarrow men from Pennsylvania.”31 They were again put out to work “on the public roads” of Baltimore County. In January 1789 several wheelbarrow men tried to escape from the jail in Philadelphia “by digging under the foundation of the building.” The jailor fired at and killed two or three of them.32 Noted for his hair, “cut remarkably short,” James Smith, also known as William Johnson, escaped the wheelbarrow in Philadelphia before being jailed in New Jersey for horse stealing. Weeks before, two other men were caught and charged with a housebreaking in New York. These men were reportedly described as “A part of the wheelbarrow gentry from Philadelphia, and which lately struck so much terror in the inhabitants of that city.”33 Most significantly, one group of four men escaped together and quickly robbed a man they allegedly identified while working in the street at the wheelbarrow. The incident escalated, and the man was murdered. The wheelbarrow men were caught, convicted, and executed for this crime.34
The actions of the escapees created a climate of fear in the city, threatening not only the viability of penal reform but also the very validity of government. People felt unsafe, and the young state appeared weak, unable to control even convicts. Philadelphia was well established as the home of state government and an important place for national political meetings. The chaos threatened not just the city but also the still weak and vulnerable national government. The ongoing violence created an obstacle for those promoting the city of Philadelphia as the ideal capital for the new nation. In 1788, the legislators claimed that Philadelphia was, “A place where lawless and wandering banditti of wheelbarrow men and the unwholesome effluvia of dirty streets, with many other nuisances, might endanger their health or lives, every hour of the day and night.”35 Members of the General Assembly remarked that Philadelphia had better clean up its act if it hoped to have the Congress relocate there from New York, as it later would in 1790. Others warned that no one was safe walking on the streets of Philadelphia in the evening unless within reach of the night watch, an early form of neighborhood policing.36
Dr. Benjamin Rush was the first to publicly outline the ways that public punishment undermined the sentimental project. Rush was a prominent physician who would become a leading voice in efforts to transform punishment. The basis for Rush’s critique was the idea that public punishment had the potential to elicit sympathy for criminals from an unsuspecting public.37 Rush believed that sympathy and compassion misdirected at prisoners laboring in public would be socially disastrous – inspiring rage at the state for inflicting punishment and possibly deadening sympathy for those truly worthy.38 When Rush delivered these ideas before a meeting of the Society for Promoting Political Inquiries at Benjamin Franklin’s house on March 9, 1787, those in attendance enthusiastically embraced his critique.39 Rush’s lecture and its dissemination in printed form would inspire and shape public debate on the subject for years, until the law was repealed in 1790. His arguments incited fear in lawyers, judges, and reformers that convicts working in chains in the city streets would elicit excessive or improper emotions in its citizens. Further, he feared that harsh punishments led to a hardened people—exactly the opposite of what he aspired to for himself and his community.40
Public punishment was by all counts a disaster. It made the city seem less safe rather than more safe. It was not crime itself, however, that created social chaos but rather ineffective punishment. It inspired an expansion of policing efforts that ultimately targeted the poor. It is easy to cite Rush’s essay as the basis for abandoning public punishment, but to do so obscures the impact of actual rebellion, violence, and disorder. Rush’s ideas about the confused emotions and moral corruption of innocent bystanders changed the conversation from one of the real resistance and violence of the wheelbarrow men to a more distant intellectual exercise in hypothetical interactions. Looking back on the end of public punishment, reformer Caleb Lownes centered his critique on the prisoners themselves, noting how punishment failed to reform them. Lownes plainly states, “Disgraceful labour or treatment of any kind, it has not had, nor can have, any valuable tendency towards restoring an offender to usefulness in society, and it is therefore discontinued.”41 This most public, visible, and physical of punishments failed because those targeted refused